Why hire a Blub?

I suppose, as I claimed that I would somehow defend Blub programmers, that I should mention why anyone would be better off hiring a Blub programmer than a Hacker.

Hackers are interested in technology rather than "the business process". This is evident in the eligibility requirements as stated by the Hacker pundits. In Raymond's essay on How to Become a Hacker, he waxes wonderful on the freedom and power of being such a person. The most motivating thing (to me) in the essay is how Hackers see the world as full of interesting problems and have a desire to solve them. Then mentions something loopy like how I should download an open-source *nix system and make changes to it. My favorite thing about programming is division of labor, and keeping the resources on my computer managed is definitely someone elses responsibility. I don't even like messing with partitions.

Peter Norvig has a nice essay called Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years. I was rolling with it, singing along with the choir, when he suggested I memorize, "how long it takes your computer to execute an instruction, fetch a word from memory (with and without a cache miss), read consecutive words from disk, and seek to a new location on disk." I have a hard enough time remembering my passwords!

And the list goes on: Raganwald wants you to be interested in writing domain-specific-languages, and Joel thinks you have to have a firm grasp on pointers to be worthwhile. Paul Graham suggests that one base a programming language choice on the ease of use of library functions only when writing "a short, throwaway program." Bleah!

The more I look at it, the more Hacker pundits think the interesting problems are close to the metal. They are really interested in computer hardware and fundamental structure. So what to Blubs find interesting?

Blubs see computers/networks/IT in general as a means to solve interesting problems. We are "business analysts" rather than "system engineers," and we are more interested in facilitating and improving the social/organizational process via technology than in technology itself. Rails and Django are great because they accelerate the capacity to get things done for the organization, not because they are great examples for other domain-specific language development. (And yes, I realize that engagement with technological possibility is a requirement for optimizing an organization's use of technology to solve its non-technological problems.)

So why would you hire a Blub rather than a Hacker? What if your organizational problems are not technological? What if your software does not give your organization a competitive edge, but you have a jillion legacy applications that need to stay running to keep the administration of your organization afloat? What if your upper management are more interested in the comparison of the legacy app running on the mainframe with a commercial ERP than the possiblity of open-source cooperation? Then you probably need people skilled at keeping the crank turning with Blub programs than starry-eyed radicals who want to rewrite the system using DSLs they invented themselves.