Anne Truitt Zelenka

There are two kinds of geeks in the world: hippies and nerds. The hippie geek feels most comfortable starting from the big picture, from the broadest stance possible, generating truth from first principles and overarching frameworks. Hippie geeks like big design questions and can get bored with details. The nerd geek, on the other hand, builds up truth from the details–she (or he, geeks are sometimes male) understands details thoroughly and isn’t satisfied until she gets every last one of them.

I learned about hippies and geeks when I was at Oracle. I worked for a British hippie manager. His right-hand man was a German nerd programmer. Together, they were the secret sauce that made the gnarliest of Oracle Applications–accounts receivable–work. If you know anything about accounting, you probably know how hairy managing your receivables gets. My hippie manager told me of the hippies and the nerds. I learned from watching the two of them together that hippies need nerds and nerds need hippies.

Just like with extroversion and introversion, most geeks can act like hippies or act like nerds–whether they qualify as one or the other depends on which one energizes them most. On introversion, Pamela Slim of Escape from Cubicle Nation says:

An introverted person would feel energized spending time alone in deep thought, or in a one-on-one conversation with someone else. Introverts are perfectly capable of delivering effective presentations to large groups and doing “extroverted” things … it will just sap their energy after doing so.

I’m a hippie geek, which means I feel most comfortable and energized when I’m dealing in big ideas. I can do the details–I couldn’t have worked as a programmer for seven years without that ability–but they make me a bit tired. I need to dip into my Buddhist books after a day of sorting out what Tim Bray or Sam Ruby are saying.

One key to working successfully if you are a serious hippie or a serious nerd is to find your complement. I dare say that James Governor and Stephen O’Grady have made a good match. On Web Worker Daily, I found my own complement in Judi Sohn. Her outrageous success from the day she started made me realize I needed to be more concrete in my posts for WWD–and that I didn’t need to boil everything down into one big idea. I saw the payoff today when my 20 Different Ways to Manage Your To Dos was blessed with links from all over, including the Delicious popular page and Lifehacker.

Fortunately for me, the industry analyst life tends toward the hippie (though you really have to know your details to be any good). I’ve been enjoying the chance to bring my hippie ideas to the question of opening up Flash, which I did today in How Open is Flash Right Now and Why Open Is Good. One thing that’s most fun about it is hearing from David Mendels, the Senior VP at Adobe in charge of Flash. I think he has some nerd tendencies–and I mean that in the most complimentary way–he is totally conversant in the details, and that brings my game up, because you really can’t make headway in technology without the big picture AND the details. When they fuse together, that’s when you have what you need to move forward. And progress is what we’re all about in the world of technology.