Facebook and the Hacker Way
It is no coincidence that we only see Mark Zuckerberg wearing a washed out gray T-shirt or college sweater when he appears in public. Whatever imagined gap there might have been between users and the mythical founder figure, the T-shirt does its job of leting the world know that he is just a regular guy. He is not in it for the money, for the fancy designer clothes, for the frills. He just wants to do his job, “serving the community” the best way he can, as he himself said when confronted at the company’s first in-person public Q&A session with the question of why he always wears a T-shirt.3 For Mark Zuckerberg, the T-shirt is about eliminating unnecessary decisions. Decisions “make you tired and consume your energy,” he claims. Knowing exactly what to wear everyday leaves him more time to “build the best product and services.” The T-shirt, Zuckerberg says, helps him dedicate all his time and energy to “reach the company’s goal and achieve the mission of helping to connect everyone in the world and giving them the ability to stay connected with the people that they love and care about” (Facebook, 2014). Bolstering his role as the hard-working CEO, the T-shirt comes to solidify Mark Zuckerberg’s image as the Samaritan of code and connectedness. Not simply the uniform of the dedicated but the uniform of a particular kind of dedication—the hacker.
Facebook famously cultivates a culture and management approach they call “the hacker way.” As described in a leter penned by Mark Zuckerberg and included in Facebook’s IPO registration statement, the hacker way is an approach to building that “involves continuous improvement and iteration” (Facebook, 2012: 69). The hacker, Zuckerberg suggests, has typically been portrayed unfairly in the media. In reality, “hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done.” As Facebook already suggests, there are diferent versions and meanings of the term “hacker.” The Facebook hacker is not like the university hackers of the 1960s described by Steve Levy (2010) in his seminal book called Hackers, nor anything like the underground hackers described more recently in Gabriela Coleman’s (2014) work on Anonymous. The Facebook hackers specifically “believe that something can always be beter, 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”. The hacker way is characterized by a number of core values, carefully crafted through slogans and popular sayings that pervade not only the company’s discourse but also its physical setting and work place. The word “hack” dominates the facades of one of Facebook’s two ofice buildings in Menlo Park, and the ofice spaces are “tatooed with slogans that inculcate through repetition the value of speed and iterative improvement: ‘Move Fast and Break Things;’ ‘This Journey Is 1% Finished;’ ‘Done Is Beter than Perfect’” (Fatal, 2012: 940). After moving headquarters in December 2011, Facebook is now even located at “the Hacker Way,” and Zuckerberg’s ofice faces onto “Hacker Square.” In a fascinating NYT article, journalist Quentin Hardy (2014) details the way in which the interiors of the ofice spaces at Facebook have been carefully designed to reflect the company’s culture of openness and change: Open ofice plans, of course, where meetings often happen on the fly, where no one has secrets, and common areas that without a warning may have the couches replaced in order to create a space of perpetual change. “Similarly, design changes to Facebook’s home page are known as ‘moving the furniture around’ ” (Hardy, 2014). The hacking culture is such an integral part of Facebook that it has become the principal way in which the company now presents itself, internally as well as externally.
Life at the Top
69