Apparently, Mark Zuckerberg Still Writes Code | Hacker News Reader

Apparently, Mark Zuckerberg Still Writes Code

techcrunch.com

"I wonder when Bill Gates last wrote code for shipping products, and if that was 5+ years after Microsoft launched."

Microsoft was founded in 1975. Gates cowrote DONKEY.BAS, which was released in 1981: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DONKEY.BAS

If you doubt BillG's technical acumen:

A Joel Spolsky classic story, "My First BillG Review"

"Bill came in...

He had my spec in his hand.

He had my spec in his hand!"

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html

Thanks. That was a good read I hadn't read before. It's so very true. Non-software people shouldn't run software shops unless they can delegate to someone who is.

I've heard that Gates last wrote production code sometime in the mid-eighties, though he wrote gradually less and less before then.

He claims to have written much of the firmware in the TRS-80 Model 100, released in 1983: http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/comphist/gates.htm...

Late 1980s. In a speech from September 1997, BillG says:

"I wish I got a chance to write more code. I do mess around. They don't let my code go in shipping products. They haven't done that for about eight years now."

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/billg/speeches/1997/...

This brings up a question that I've been wondering lately. Does Steve Jobs code, or did he simply bring business skills to the table when Apple was starting out?

From what i understand he has a knowledge of CS, but didnt delve into code at apple. From Mortiz' book, I can tell he did write code for Atari.

He reportedly claimed to have read Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming, which would certainly require some serious CS and mathematics chops to comprehend.

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Professor Knuth," Steve said. "I've read all of your books."

"You're full of shit," Knuth responded.

http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Close_Encounters_of_t...

There's a Google talk that Randall Munroe did. Knuth was there and Munroe asked him about that story, Knuth seemed to deny it.

"Full of shit" seems a very un-Knuth-y expression.

[edited to add: I should of course just have called it "unknuth", but my pun-sense wasn't quick enough on the mark.]

He mostly did business, but he was somewhat well versed in electronics. He was nowhere near a match for Woz, so he got out of it fairly quickly. He probably did lend a hand on the assembly line in the early days.

With the Apple I and Apple II, there was a lot of work in assembling the machines, lining up parts, and arranging sales. It's not like a startup now where it's mostly software.

I think you mean "It's not like a [software] startup now where it's mostly software." There are still hardware startups where people are populating boards and assembling products. The goal is to quickly get through that stage, but in the beginning, not everyone can afford the large order requirements for outsourced manufacturing.

There's an idea for a startup: outsourced manufacturing for startups with small orders.

It's not really necessary since even the big contract manufacturers will take pretty small orders, especially if there's an opportunity for a JDM/ODM project or a sustaining engineering contract in the future. The big guys also have the advantage of an economy of scale in dealing with component suppliers.

Blake Ross can't see Mark Zuckerberg's commits? What kind of silo'd operation do they have?

It's an attention grab. I think it's funny that 34 people "like" it when they don't even know what it is or does.

Well, "like" is really vague. Could be that they like the fact that he's committing code, or that he's still writing code, or that he's posting about it, or... whatever. You can twist "like" to look bad for almost any FB wall post.

I can see Mark's commits. It's just much easier to ask him what it is when it's 2am and I'm not VPN'd into our corporate network.

Good to know! (I was teasing, mainly, but did wonder a bit if Mark's coy response was pure affect or not.)

F8 is a conference, right? Doesn't this probably just mean he wrote some demo code, not real product code?

Unit tests, though-- not super common to write those for demo code, right?

Why not, you want the demo code to work, right?

Obviously it's better, but I'm not so sure it's common.

Whether it was for a feature or a demo, I like hearing about founders who turn into executives still coding and working on improving the code in their product.

Yeah, that's what I assumed. He probably just misses coding and decided to do something for a demo

Programmers should be like barristers or brain surgeons - you don't promote the best into management, you hire a manager. Like Fred's surgical team.

But it's not like that, because, I think, the main usefulness of programming is not in the code, but in the recognition of the problem to solve. ie. business

I would too. It must be a lot easier having that many smart people to help you, the CEO, out

And by "still writes code" does he mean "was paid to write someone else's social network, took that code and committed it to Facebook instead"?

Respect.

My first thought: is this the most effective way that the CEO of one of the web's biggest companies should be spending his time? Hacking is fun, sure, but I'm not sure I want the captain of my ship down greasing the engine.

Everything sends a signal and I suspect his maturity isn't quite there when posting to Twitter (er, or does he use Facebook?) about a check-in. If this were a public company and I were a shareholder, I would wonder.

A secret of success: do only the things that only you are capable of doing, like shaking hands and making deals. Let everyone else handle the rest.

While I agree that he could be doing better things with his time, his job is also to convey an image that attracts engineers. The idea of working on code alongside Zuck might be a big pull to some people.

hmmm. my first thought, as an engineer, was "thank goodness i'm not the one who has to review that code".

is the guy really keeping track of recent changes? can you really criticise his work just like anyone else? seems like he might be making life harder for others...

If you don't code you become a pointy hairy boss :)

If you do, then you become a bald-headed boss. :)

I'd cut him a bit of slack as facebook just took over google as the most trafficked in the world.

Can you point to some data for that? All the ranking sites I see still have Google at the top.

A secret of success: do only the things that you are capable of doing, like shaking hands and making deals.

I hardly think that this is all that zuckerberg is capable of doing, since he was the one who initially hacked on facebook (as well as some music sharing program in high school, iirc)

"With a classmate, Adam D’Angelo (now a student at CalTech and still a close friend) Zuckerberg designed a program that learned a listener’s musical tastes, and then designed a playlist to match.

“It learned your listening patterns by figuring out how much you like each song at a given point and time, and which songs you tend to listen to around each other,” Zuckerberg says.

The friends created a plug-in for the popular MP3 player WinAmp and posted it up for free on the Internet."

"When Zuckerberg starts a programming project, all else takes a backseat. He doesn’t eat, doesn’t sleep, doesn’t talk to friends."

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/6/10/mark-e-zuckerber...

Further: "Microsoft and AOL tried to purchase Synapse and recruit Zuckerberg, but he decided to attend Harvard University instead."

The guy was almost recruited out of high school by Microsoft and AOL. If that isn't impressive, I don't know what is.

I think he meant: 'do the things that only you are capable of doing.'

I did, thank you. Updated.

It seems likely to me that the code of the Facebook of today is probably of a pretty different sort than that initial hacking. The problems are very different.

But it's also likely that Mr. Z. has kept up with those changes, on some level at least.

Coding is therapeutic especially when you don't have to do it. Besides, its an easy way to enter flow. "The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_%28psychology%29

For me coding is definately therapeutic. I'm getting my MD and doing gene therapy research at the same time.

Doing some coding during the weekends make me relax (and angry if I cant fix stupid bugs :P). It makes me totally forget the other stuff so that I can start freshly again on monday.

> do only the things that you are capable of doing

..if you want to never challenge yourself, learn anything new, or push the boundaries of the possible.

The captain of the ship does whatever he has to do to keep his ship running. Part of management is picking up the slack.

While it may not be wise if Zuckerberg wanted to pretend he was just another production coder, there's no evidence that that's what's happened here. Why shouldn't a CEO be able to express some ideas in code? If that code is production quality there's no reason it couldn't go into production.

A lot of managers get this idea that they shouldn't consort with the little people anymore. That is a horrible idea that leads to horrible abuses and problems; for some hard-to-understand reason involving ego and job security, the reality of things tends to warp a bit as it travels up the chains of management, even if the organization has a relatively flat hierarchy.

The real way to make sure everything is going well is to interview and trust the people who are set out to do the job. imo every CEO should cut through the managers and interview a random selection of "low-level" people, i.e., people who actually build the thing your company is selling, or whatever, very often. They are the ones which are most passionate, best informed, and best equipped to help.

I understand that sometimes organizations get to a size where managers are required to oversee the day-to-day, but it's vital that the highest levels at a company are concerned and informed more with front-line opinions than the warped reports passed up through five levels of managers.

Dude, that's not Twitter.

If you're offering Zuckerberg "secrets of success" I really hope you are a Steve Jobs sockpuppet account.

"I really hope you are a Steve Jobs sockpuppet account"

Probably not. The Jobs-o-grams that I've seen are terse. Jobs probably would have written something like:

"Mark should not be hacking. We wouldn't want a Captain greasing a ship's engine."

This goes back to the idea that once someone gets to a certain level they can't write code any more. It can be argued that writing the code is just as important as some of the other CEO tasks.

I think a better argument is that once you get to a certain level you don't have the time to write code anymore. More importantly you probably don't have the time to read code anymore, and presumably at facebook, there's a lot of code to read every week just to keep up.

The fact that he is the "CEO of one of the web's biggest companies" means he earned the right to decide to write code if he wants to. Successful businesses aren't created by following every principle in the latest business books.

I might disagree that it's a poor use of Mark's time. The only product that Facebook has is software and a large portion, I'm guessing, comprises of internal APIs. So, what better way to test their quality than by writing some code against them? I don't know if this is what he's doing or not, but it seems like a logical guess.

I would expect the captain of a ship to make sure the engine is running correctly, even if that means a personal inspection.

Plus, from what I've read, a lot of internal discussions at Facebook are settled by writing demo code/applications showing a concrete implementation of an idea.

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