Why The Haters are Wrong About Growth Hacking

Re:Why The Haters are Wrong About Growth Hacking by neya on Saturday January 11, 2014 @01:10PM (#7043201)

I think I've actually had marketers convince me of this term before, but in my personal opinion the term 'hacker' itself is misused to the point where it no longer makes sense.

This is from a very real recent conversation between my friend and me:

    *Me*: ...so that's great! What do you do now?

    *Tom*: Man, I'm a hacker at <company name> security services INC.
    [His company is actually security company]

Three days later, I chat with him:

    *Me*: Hey is there anyway to recover my network password?
    I think I forgot it and I can't seem to get it to work!

    *Tom*: No man, I don't deal with that stuff, I belong to a different department.
    Maybe I can connect you with one of my friends from the actual security department?

    *Me*: Wait, I thought you were a hacker?!

    *Tom*: Yeah, a growth hacker ;)

Obviously, Tom isn't his real name.

Another example is wherein one of my friends told me he actually 'hacked' his car. I really thought he did something to his engine/ECU until when he confessed to me that he just found out a way of shifting gears that made the car accelerate (slightly) faster.

The problem with the term 'hacker' is that it's mis-used to the point where it affects it's actual meaning. Now imagine if Tom had said that in an interview or in an environment where bullshit terms and hipster buzz words are not common, like a traditional enterprise company for example.

My favorite HN commenter RyanZAG put it out beautifully in one of his comments from an old thread[1]:

    That's the point, [a growth hacker] is actively making it difficult for you to 
    understand him. By dropping in words with complex backgrounds, he hopes you 
    (you generally, not you in particular) do not have enough knowledge 
    in those domains to understand how those terms do/do not fit together. 
    This leaves you in a position of having to accept his point as there might be 
    truth in what he is saying - you aren't knowledgeable enough to tell the difference 
    between the correct and incorrect usage of the terms.

    Generally, someone who understands the concepts will not use terms strung together like that unless forced.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5176152

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Re:Why The Haters are Wrong About Growth Hacking by bhaumik on Saturday January 11, 2014 @03:18PM (#7043600)

The car example brings to mind Richard Stallman's post, On Hacking:

"It is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have "hack value"."

http://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html

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Re:Why The Haters are Wrong About Growth Hacking by vezzy-fnord on Saturday January 11, 2014 @01:15PM (#7043218)

I've already said before that it's the best to drop the term "hacker" altogether, unless you define it beforehand or are in a setting where it already has been implicitly defined (like in a hackerspace).

There's too many of them, some contradictory.

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