Paul Graham: Great Hackers

Still reading. But this is right on:

Companies like Cisco are proud that everyone there has a cubicle, even the CEO. But they're not so advanced as they think; obviously they still view office space as a badge of rank. Note too that Cisco is famous for doing very little product development in house. They get new technology by buying the startups that created it-- where presumably the hackers did have somewhere quiet to work.

Giving hackers a great environment to work is the cheapest investment you can have for a great software company. The first thing I didn't like when arriving at Cisco was the small cubicle size, compared to the AOL size that was already reduced from the Netscape size.

More comments to follow.