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Every programmer is guilty of it. Fumbling with someone else’s software we get egotistical, enraged, eccentric — call it what you want — and think Argh! I can write this better!

More times than not, these very programs are enormous software packages like the Apache web server, the Linux kernel, or actual programming languages themselves.

But love is blind so we open our text editors and begin pounding out the code. Weeks of somewhat fruitful work ensue until we crash and the ambition is lost. We realize You know, they really did do a good job writing that.

This is what I call the Caveman Complex. Mentally, most of us just can’t stand using someone else’s code not knowing what’s going on behind the scenes so we reinvent the wheel continuously. Perhaps it’s the hacker spirit wanting to learn how a system works. Wait, actually, it’s exactly that.

A perfect example of the Caveman Complex is the Linux operating system. Perhaps the most impressive accomplishment of the open source movement, Linux remains very ambiguous behind the scenes to most because any good operating system should. A software developer’s prime directive must be to make their system painless to use. So how do we hackers get our fix on the nitty-gritty? Why, we make our own Linux operating system! This occurs so frequently that many outsiders simply don’t take Linux seriously — with good reason. Frankly, no one should take these spin-offs seriously. Tying this segue back, these outsiders must understand how programmers think: with a Caveman Complex! Only Linux distributions backed corporately deserve trust. Everything else is just us goofing off. We’re programmers. We can’t help ourselves.

But how detrimental is this mentality? Conventional wisdom suggests reinventing the wheel is awful. Economically, this redundancy constitutes inefficiency. As the rambling futurist on his soap box would affirm, if we’re to continue our major leaps forward, our efficiency should be improving, not following the habitual tendencies of our engineers to toy around. Since we programmers are a key foundation on which technological progress depends, inefficient habits are absolutely taboo. Or are they?

I say this hacker spirit — this Caveman Complex — is as necessary to society as the developers themselves. These feelings of curiosity and exploration, albeit inefficient, are what make programming fun and, most importantly, are what teach programmers. Any seasoned coder will answer the question “How can I learn a programming language?” the same way: “Sit down and start coding!” What they code doesn’t matter as much as the fact they’ve actually begun the process. Mistakes must be made before they can be learned from.

So if our Caveman Complexes should be nurtured, how do we respond? Should executives financially fuel this drive to work on personal projects? Some do, but most shouldn’t have to. Those to whom programming comes naturally will do this unconditionally in their free time. In fact, in today’s competitive world, programmers are perhaps living testimonies to natural selection. Keep it alive or fall behind.

Programmers, to you I encourage tinkering. I encourage writing your own relational database management system when MySQL can outperform what you produce in every possible way. I encourage writing your own MP3 meta-data decoder when realistically you can’t allow for the tiny modifications made by the innumerable different encoders used over the years. I encourage writing your own Xorg window manager that might save you 0.2 seconds when you want to open a bash terminal. Society needs you to!

Always remember: Keep it alive or fall behind.