By Kevin McCauley
Facebook’s rapid growth is largely due to its ‘Hacker Way” management philosophy, according to a letter from founder Mark Zuckerberg that is part of the social networker’s Securities and Exchange Commission registration filing.
In noting the negative connotation of the word “hacker” as one who breaks into computers, Zuckerberg wrote, “In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done.”
In his view, the majority of hackers are “idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.”
The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Staffers believe that “something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo,” wrote Zuckerberg.
Facebook tries to build the best service by “quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once.”
It has a testing framework “that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words ‘Done is better than perfect’ painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping,” the CEO wrote.
Hacking is an inherently hands-on and active discipline. “Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments,” according to Zuckerberg.
The hacker culture is open and meritocratic. “Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people,” he wrote.
The company runs “hackathons” every few months, where everyone builds prototypes based on their ideas. Facebookers look at everything that is built.
“Many of our most successful products came out of hackathons, including Timeline, chat, video, mobile development framework and some of our most important infrastructure like the HipHop compiler,” wrote Zuckerberg.
Facebook filed for an IPO to raise as much as $10B on Wednesday. |