[hackerspaces] The Hacker Way

[Yves Quemener]

I still hope this IPO will fail and make the social media bubble burst.

I doubt Zuckberg obeys the definition of "idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world."



On 02/03/2012 12:59 AM, Jordan Miller wrote:
> from Zuckerberg's open letter to investors about the impending Facebook IPO...
>
> jordan
>
>
>
> The Hacker Way
>
> As part of building a strong company, we work hard at making Facebook
> the best place for great people to have a big impact on the world and
> learn from other great people. We have cultivated a unique culture and
> management approach that we call the Hacker Way.
>
> The word "hacker" has an unfairly negative connotation from being
> portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality,
> hacking just means building something quickly or testing the
> boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for
> good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I've met tend to be
> 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. Hackers 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.
>
> Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly
> releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to
> get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built 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.
>
> Hacking is also 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."
>
> Hacker culture is also extremely 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.
>
> To encourage this approach, every few months we have a hackathon,
> where everyone builds prototypes for new ideas they have. At the end,
> the whole team gets together and looks at everything that has been
> built. Many of our most successful products came out of hackathons,
> including Timeline, chat, video, our mobile development framework and
> some of our most important infrastructure like the HipHop compiler.
>
> 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. There are a lot of folks in the
> industry who manage engineers and don't want to code themselves, but
> the type of hands-on people we're looking for are willing and able to
> go through Bootcamp.
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