Facebook Guards Hacker Mentality to Stave Off Complacency 12 October 2012, by Jessica Guynn

Facebook guards hacker mentality to stave off complacency 12 October 2012, by Jessica Guynn

Facebook Inc. is on the outs with investors, and switch that Facebook staffers pull when they launch the tumbling stock price has dented employees' a new product was built during a hackathon. morale and personal net worth. But at 1 Hacker Way, there's no stopping the hacker culture - or the "As the company gets bigger, we tend to become hackathon. more disconnected," said Pedram Keyani, an engineering manager who organizes the Last week, amped Facebook staffers sprawled on hackathons. "This helps bring people together." couches and chairs, plugging away on laptops and filling white boards with software code as they took Last week's hackathon theme, "the next billion," part in the company's 33rd hackathon. was also a nudge in their ribs to stay focused on the big picture. The hackathon kicked off with a A communal room pulsed with techno music. rally in a central courtyard where large concrete Giant white motivational posters with bright red squares spell out "HACK." lettering lined the walls: "Fortune Favors the Bold" and "What Would You Do if You Weren't Afraid?" "Where else in the world could you say that you Big screens rolled live feeds of staffers hacking in work at a company that 1 billion people use?" Facebook offices in Seattle and New York. Keyani shouted to the crowd. "Now we have to make them 1 billion daily active users." Hackathons are the brainchild of 28-year-old founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, Missing from the festivities on the moonlit campus who organized the first one in his Harvard dorm was Zuckerberg. He was on a flight home from room. Employees pull all-nighters to build new Russia where he met with Prime Minister Dmitry products and features that have nothing to do with Medvedev and recruited new users and engineers. their day jobs. Zuckerberg borrowed and built on the high-tech Facebook's marathon coding sessions are industry's hacker ethos which dates back more than becoming increasingly important to the company half a century to when geeks at the Massachusetts as it faces pressure to rack up its next billion users Institute of Technology hacked telephone systems without losing the attention of the 1 billion it already and computers. Silicon Valley companies host has. regular hackathons, and hackathons have even spread to the mainstream, with people hacking With the management philosophy that he dubbed tools for Occupy Wall Street protests or to fight "The Hacker Way," Zuckerberg wants to guard autism. against complacency out of fear that Facebook could become too bureaucratic and bloated to At Facebook, the word "hack" is painted and innovate quickly and keep its competitive edge. plastered all over the company's campus. Motivational posters push employees to tinker and Some of Facebook's biggest features such as experiment: "Move Fast and Break Things." chat, the "like" button and an early version of its Timeline came out of hackathons. So did a few of In a letter to investors for the company's its most amusing ideas, such as a yellow brick prospectus, Zuckerberg said: "Hackers believe that road on its campus and a "classy" men's bathroom something can always be better, and that nothing is with an iPod playing classical music and a cologne ever complete. They just have to go fix it - often in dispenser. Even the wooden plank with a big the face of people who say it's impossible or are

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content with the status quo." As the sun rose, staffers nodded off on couches as the batteries on their laptops slowly died. The Hackathons, which take place every six to eight hackathon officially ended at 6 a.m. The prize for weeks, help reinforce that hacker ethos as the participating: a hackathon T-shirt. company grows, Keyani said. Facebook has jumped from 600 employees to 4,000 in the past Keyani went in search of a shower and a clean four years. About half the company takes part, with shirt. "It's all positive except for the level of the exception of the hackathon the night before the productivity the next day," he said. company's IPO, when everyone pulled an all- nighter to be on hand when Zuckerberg rang the Seven hours later, Zuckerberg, fresh off his return Nasdaq opening bell the next morning. flight from Russia, stepped onto a podium to hoots and high fives. He celebrated hitting 1 billion users, For days beforehand, Facebook employees and then reminded everyone to focus on the floated ideas on an internal Facebook group to get challenges ahead. feedback and recruit co-workers to help. On the night of the hackathon, they huddled in small Product designer Blaise DiPersia said he still groups, glued to their laptops. hasn't quite processed the realization that the features his colleagues spent all night developing Amanda Johnson, a technical program manager, might soon reach 1 out of 7 people on the planet. and Song Xu, a partner development manager, were working on a way to encourage users to "I can't really comprehend it," he said, shaking his update to the latest version of the Facebook mobile head. "It's overwhelming." app, something that has become increasingly important as Facebook ships more updates. Then he did what all Facebook employees do after clocking a new milestone. He went back to "Existing technology is not making it easy for work. normal users to be aware of the updates or the value of the updates. Our job is to make it easy," (c)2012 Los Angeles Times Xu said. "With the hackathons, you always have a Distributed by MCT Information Services chance to step out of your normal comfort zone to try something new."

Johnson and Xu have two weeks to polish their product before presenting it to the company. If Facebook staffers like it, they'll shout "Ship! Ship! Ship!"

Throughout the night, Facebook staffers all over campus collaborated and coded, mostly on mobile features designed to give Facebook a boost in its effort to reach users who more and more are accessing the service on mobile devices, not personal computers. A few worked on an evacuation tool that would track who was on campus and might need help in the event of a disaster, some even carved pumpkins. They refueled at long white tables loaded with egg rolls and other Chinese food from Jing Jing, the same Palo Alto, Calif., restaurant that has been feeding hackathons for years.

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APA citation: Facebook guards hacker mentality to stave off complacency (2012, October 12) retrieved 30 September 2021 from https://phys.org/news/2012-10-facebook-hacker-mentality-stave- complacency.html

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