Paul Graham, in an essay on what went wrong with Yahoo, regarding which companies need to have a hacker-centric culture:
As Yahoo discovered, the area covered by this rule is bigger than most people realize. The answer is: any company that needs to have good software. …. [Y]ou can’t attract good programmers to work in a suit-centric culture. And without good programmers you won’t get good software, no matter how many people you put on a task, or how many procedures you establish to ensure “quality.”
Furthermore:
Hacker culture often seems kind of irresponsible. That’s why people proposing to destroy it use phrases like “adult supervision.” That was the phrase they used at Yahoo. But there are worse things than seeming irresponsible. Losing, for example.
