What does hack mean to you?

I got in an argument with a co-worker today about this......He called me a "hack" and I became curious as to what the actual meaning is.  He claimed it is when an installer does something of questionable integrity during an installation.

but I've seen installers that the word hack and them do not belong in the same sentence do things that some may call questionable integrity. After asking around the bay I found that everyone had their own oppinion as to what qualifys as "hacking" an install.

So...........I figured that some people in here would have some interesting input to this topic as they normally do when it comes to pride in install and I thought i'd throw it out there for everyone to input their own two cents.

JS

What was the discussion about?.. To me, a hack is not a professional or not a professional job. Doesn't mean it won't work, just that it wasn't done in a professional manner. An example of this would be the AC unit I saw installed.. individual used a sawzall to cut a hole through a sheet rock wall and slid a window AC unit in.. we were trying to cool our office because the building AC blew up and management wasn't eager to fix it. While the hack job worked, it leaked water all over the floor, under the carpet and got everything moldy smelling.

More examples would be 'spit and twist' wire connections, use of twist on wire nuts, masking tape or duct tape used as electrical tape, etc. Many owner installs are hack jobs.

Jim

If I had a nickel for every cut harness..............................

I remember the time we were removing a deck, four, and two amps from a dodge 4 door truck.  It was done at one of the more prestigious shops in the area and a fellow installer and I felt inferior while removing the equiptment.  The orignal installers after cutting the speaker harness in the door put butt connectors on the removed harness plugged it back into the factory speaker and bagged all four individually.  They made amazing adapter plates for the 6.5 componets in the front door 6x9 holes. The tweeters were in the factory dash locations and crossovers were tucked neatly but very high in each kick.........................after all the impressive work done and attention to detail that could only be appreciated if you could have seen the care taken during the install.........we get to the deck  expecting to be impressed with their trend of quality.  We find three out of four screws holding the kit in the dash, when we get the deck out the antenna cable had been cut and a motorola end poorly taped in place of the chrysler ant connector.   and the harness was cut...... but not only was it cut there was barely enough wire extending from the harness to see any of the colors.

I have no real point to this story except that even though 90% of the installation was above par the little part that was far below par made the entire install look bad.  (well not really bad but it's not as glorious as it would have been with a ten dollar harness and a nine dollar ant adapter) 

it can be used to describe something which is improperly implemented, ugly, or done in a quick and dirty way.