Will the Next Zuckerberg Be a Designer, not a Hacker?

Zuckberg IS a designer. Facebook gained massive initial traction not because it was technologically superior to other options (although it eventually ended up being so), but because it was very well thought out from a product perspective.

The next Zuckerberg will be a hacker regardless of if he is a designer.

I think designers will play a bigger role in founding teams in the future as products need to be designed for various platforms such as touch tablets, browser based web apps, mobile devices, etc. Each will require a unique set of interactions and design elements.

False dichotomy. What's happening now is that the barriers to both fields are being lowered, and the youth coming up today has the opportunity to become adept at both from an early age.

Granted, both fields require different thought processes and it's rare if not impossible to be truly great in both, but that's not what a startup needs. A startup needs a decent idea, fast execution, and hustle at all levels. Two things that factor very little into developing traction are stunning design and impeccable engineering. You want something that works and looks decent, but it's more important to move quickly and achieve product-market fit.

Lest we forget, the reason Facebook took off in the first place is Privacy.

The design changed every six months or so.

Ideas are a dime a dozen. To start a company such as Facebook, you must have an intimate knowledge with how your product works. A 'Hacker' implies that someone knows the internals of their program, a 'Designer' implies they know how to make it look and feel nice.

The Hacker mentality works great for leading a company, knowing the ins and outs and possible future situations. The Designer mentality does not, making it look and feel nice.

The next Zuckerberg will be a hacker.

The next big guy (let's not make the poor guy/girl follow someone else's legacy) can be anybody who is great in either of Design, Programming or Business and practically capable (if not 10X) in the other two.

If you are just a great hacker, you CANNOT be the next thing. If you are just a designer, you CANNOT be the next big thing. And likewise.

Assumption: You do not have a team/cofounder that/who compliments your skills totally and share the same vision.

Seems like there is an anecdote somewhere about how, in the early days of Google, an anonymous user would occasionally send the developers a message that simply stated the number of elements (words/links/whatever) on the main page, whenever that number went up. The developers took the implicit message to heart and endeavored to keep the noise to an absolute minimum.

Do you need to be a designer to realize that simplicity is a virtue?

I think that the mindset of Zuckerberg or the next Zuckerberg will be the one of a hacker. Making him/her in fact a hacker.

What I'm trying to say is: Designers are hackers not in the software engineering point of view but in the problem solvers one.

In my opinion he was successful early on not because of his exceptional programming skills (although nobody said Facebook is the easiest thing to develop), but because his "Product Designer" skills.

This one is a hacker?

What makes you think good designers are not hackers and that Mark Zuckerberg is not also a designer?

Funny thing is that, especially early, Facebook didn't require particularly good programming skills. But it did have a much better and more professional, less sleazy (MySpace) or nerdy (LiveJournal) -looking UI than it's competitors/progenitors did. And then grew in a very intelligent and calculated away (Harvard first, then other Ivy League, then other colleges, etc.; and refusing to commercialize the experience too early). All of that really had nothing to do with the quality of the code or the main coder behind it (Zuck). Quality of the designer (arguably, especially early on: Zuck) and strategic direction (Zuck again?), but not of the hacking.