La lettera di Mark Zuckerberg che accompagna i documenti inviati alla SEC per l'IPO di Facebook è piena di buoni propositi - e Nicholas Carr fa un po' di sarcasmo sulla natura filantropica dello zuckerberg-pensiero -, ma è anche (a mia conoscenza) il primo documento in cui una big corporation (anche se atipica) da 75 miliardi di dollari di capitalizzazione (a stare stretti) abbraccia la cultura hacker come politica aziendale. (ecco la lettera commentata da Tim Carmody su Wired USA)
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.
Rought Type, Epicenter (Wired USA)
