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How The Hacker Way helped propel Facebook to market dominance

2012-02-01 18:38
Read more about Facebook Facebook files its S-1 (Read full filing) Facebook says mobile is big risk - starting with Android and iOS Mark Zuckerberg owns 28.2 of Facebook, Peter Thiel has 2.5 Facebook says mobile is big risk - starting with Android and iOS Facebookв s monster mobile numbers: Over 425M users How Zuckerberg wrested control of Facebook from his shareholders Facebook has 845M monthly users, 2.7B likes comments each day Zynga accounted for $445M, or 12 percent of Facebookв s revenue, in 2011 Facebook made $1B on $3.7B in revenue last year Facebook 8217;s core values include a powerful, results-oriented, anti-theoretical philosophy called The Hacker Way, according to founder Mark Zuckerberg. The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration, Zuckerberg writes. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it 8212; often in the face of people who say itв s impossible or are content with the status quo. The remarkable letter from Zuckerberg appears in Facebook 8217;s S-1 form announcing its intention to go public, which the SEC released to the public today. No starting price has yet been named, but Facebook said in the filing it expects to raise $5 billion in the IPO. The transaction may leave the company valued between between $75 and $100 billion. The Hacker Way, Zuckerberg writes, is embedded deeply into the company 8217;s culture. It prioritizes code-based solutions over theoretical arguments, practicality over perfection, risk-taking, and iteration (creating things quickly, testing, then refining). It 8217;s a remarkable codification of principles that many programmers and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have understood for a long time. The 37signals founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeyer Hansen elaborated a similar philosophy in their book Rework, and Eric Ries touts an entrepreneurial version of the code in his book and blog, The Lean Startup. Reading a business book is one thing; seeing the principle outlined in the SEC documents filed by a company planning to go perfect is another. It 8217;s a sign of how deeply the hacker ethos has transformed the way the tech industry works. Among other things, the philosophy appears in sayings that Facebook employees frequently repeat. Done is better than perfect. Code wins arguments. Move fast and break things. The riskiest thing is to take no risks. Leaving nothing to chance, the company also ensures that all employees are steeped in this worldview by putting them through a Facebook Bootcamp. To make sure all our engineers share this approach, we require all new engineers - even managers whose primary job will not be to write code - to go through a program called Bootcamp where they learn our codebase, our tools and our approach, Zuckerberg writes. There are a lot of folks in the industry who manage engineers and donв t want to code themselves, but the type of hands-on people weв...
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