For a big company, I like the way Facebook is run...but, the word "hacker" is officially no longer cool.
I used to associate the word "hacker" with "badass." It was not a title to be tossed around like the village whore, it was only given to people who had proved themselves with years of hard work, and ingenious or innovative hacks. Becoming a hacker was the equivalent of finding Enlightenment. Any hacker can collaborate, but hackers also stuck me as renegades - people who would build something great with their own two hands.
Hacker culture is probably not something you will find in a company that has just gone public. A public company with as much money invested as Facebook has too much to lose to embrace real hacker culture - which cares nothing for deadlines, rules, managers, filling out wireframes, etc.
I am sure there are plenty of smart people at Facebook, but it all feels a little too rah-rah school spirit, ping pong tables in the break room, silicon valley kool aid, etc etc. Not the seedy basement you expect hackers to infest. :)
Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.
This reminds me of a company I respect for their history and ability to do great things (relative to their field). Things may have changed in more recent years but I recall a statement similar to this one made by Ferrari years ago. It went something like this:
We don't race so we can sell street cars, we sell street cars so we can race.
Interesting, because I was also thinking of Disney. They had enormous conflicts in Florida with the experienced hotel executives they brought in to run the new hotels.
Ultimately those hotel men were pushed out by the Disney managers, who all shared the same corporate DNA: fanatical attention to guest experience combined with unawareness of money.
One store generated $100k/year in revenue, and cost $1M/year to run. That was perfect from Disney's viewpoint.
"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."
Hopefully Facebook's success will see more and more companies moving to this sort of management style.
I think the API timeline fiasco has other roots, probably mostly related to weak leadership in guiding the overall user experience.
This is a worthwhile nugget of wisdom though, I've found it also applies to delegation. If nothing ever goes wrong you probably aren't delegating hard enough, which means you are wasting a lot of time doing things that should be done by others (and also holding other people back by preventing them from taking on new responsibilities). The trick is finding the boundary.
This is absolutely the most refreshing outlook there has ever been from a public company. It truly is amazing that Facebook still has the hacker mentally. I'm confident their stock will do extremely well in there years to come.
> The examples above all relate to engineering, but we have distilled these principles into five core values for how we run Facebook...
They are reconciling the business/management style well known in the hacker community with the traditional need for big businesses to have vision statements, guiding principles, etc. etc.
As Ries says,
> It is a 21st-century manifesto for a new way of doing business.
"While Zuckerberg promised that thefacebook.com would boast new features by the end of the week, he said that he did not create the website with the intention of generating revenue."
I don't disagree that they have a good culture there, but I don't think they've reached a good balance between done and perfect yet. Loads of Facebook is riddled with bugs and at times, rendered totally unusable. The only reason they're able to get away with such an imbalance is that their product taps into the primal urge to be connected with other people, so much so that their users will overcome all odds to get on Facebook and connect with their friends. And for that, I don't much care for Facebook. Make a great service, not crap built to take advantage of a human instinct.
I used to associate the word "hacker" with "badass." It was not a title to be tossed around like the village whore, it was only given to people who had proved themselves with years of hard work, and ingenious or innovative hacks. Becoming a hacker was the equivalent of finding Enlightenment. Any hacker can collaborate, but hackers also stuck me as renegades - people who would build something great with their own two hands.
Hacker culture is probably not something you will find in a company that has just gone public. A public company with as much money invested as Facebook has too much to lose to embrace real hacker culture - which cares nothing for deadlines, rules, managers, filling out wireframes, etc.
I am sure there are plenty of smart people at Facebook, but it all feels a little too rah-rah school spirit, ping pong tables in the break room, silicon valley kool aid, etc etc. Not the seedy basement you expect hackers to infest. :)