Lessons Learned: The Hacker Way

· Ben’s Blog

Eric Ries picked out a portion of Facebook's S-1 filing where Zuckerburg presents "The Hacker Way", which is a manifesto of sorts:

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.

Although I regularly loathe the facebook and don't like their business model or view on privacy, I'm impressed with how straightforward Zuckerburg's approach to running his company is. It comes down to having the right team (a team of hackers), to the point of requiring all engineers to go through 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. 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.

And it's obviously working out for him.