Capitalism and the Hacker Ethic

One American cultural trait I try to demonstrate in my Peace Corps work is persistence. In the design of the accounting for the coffee association I work with, we were met with a number of obstacles. I would design the account hierarchy in one way, modeling the business as I understood it – one expense account here, another inventory account there, all these account payables over in aquel lado. As we continued entering the mountain of paper receipts into the program we would inevitably run into problems in the account model. I had understood the business one way, and it turned out to work another. No big deal right. These things are not set in stone, we’ll just rework the model.

But my project partner, the association’s operations manager, would get very dispirited. While I frowned and scratched my head and tapped my fingers, puzzling over the solution, Arelis would sigh and fuss and worry herself. She’d lament, "Oh, I guess this won't ever work. We'll just have to give up and try something else." This spoken by someone who had watched the association pay professional accountants thousands to try and fail to wrap their heads around the business. I said, "No, Arelis. That's not how we do it. We enjoy puzzles. We like challenges. We finish what we start."

Sometimes we'd resolve the issue within minutes, other times it took days. But I never doubted for a minute that the brilliant GnuCash system could not be molded to our will. I knew it was sufficiently flexible and robust for any business of our size. If there was a problem, it was to be found in our own thinking, our own creativity. This was not how Arelis, the association's Dominican secretary saw things. She'd see the puzzled look come over my face and would be ready to give up. This stick-to-it-iveness, this Hacker Ethic, is an essential skill for a small Caribbean island, with few comparative advantages but its own charming people. If these people can develop the persistence to educate themselves in modern commercial arts and technology, this place might get a reputation for more than sunny beaches and great cigars.