If Harvard started admitting 50,000 students a year, the density of Zuckerbergs would be a lot lower. They'd still be there, but harder to find.
Unfortunately.
Not sure the concentration of Zuckerbergs and the concentration of hackers is particularly related, except maybe the latter attracts the former.
Zuckerberg's no genius, he was in the right place at the right time near the right people. He's competent, but no more than most of the people here. His morals (or the flexibility thereof) were what made him rich.
Zuckerberg is clearly a not-great guy in some ways, but the reason we're all posting on Hacker News during the workday and he's running a centibillion dollar company is because he's an immensely intelligent and talented and focused man and we are... well, the kind of people who post on internet forums during the workday.
>the reason we're all posting on Hacker News during the workday and he's running a centibillion dollar company is because he's an immensely intelligent and talented and focused man and we are... well, the kind of people who post on internet forums during the workday.
There are people who post regularly in HN (even in the top-50 contributors) who as hackers and programmers (and work ethic) run not just circles, but the 10-dimensional equivalent of a circle, around Zuckenberg, and have no "multi-billion dollar" companies...
But also the dude obviously is a great hacker. There are vanishingly few people who can bootstrap the infrastructure that will let a company grow to Facebook scale -- you need exceptional depth and breadth of computer knowledge, as well as great focus and an ability to prioritize and satisfice.
Well, he didn't do that. He just wrote a crappy basic PHP backend. The "scaling at Facebook scale" part happened later, after people were hired and VC money flew in.
Same like early Twitter was a crap Rails app that they even had to restart a few times a day because of memory leaks. It still got them through to attract users (even though it crashed all the time) and money, so they eventually were able to fix that and grow to Twitter scale.
None of those things happened because of very talented hacker founders. Those kind of apps aren't even very technical or different to the average CRUD app - not until the scale/infrastructure people come in much later: those do the actual hard work.
Cloudflare, Redis, SQLlite, Nginx, ElasticSearch etc, on the other hand, are a different story. Those are absolutely apps/platforms made from scratch by seriously talented hackers, even if others were involved to improve them later on.
lol. citation needed.
Among geniuses who can build a FAANG company from scratch, I'm sure Zuck is not the strongest software engineer or hacker or whatever. Like, Jeff Dean is undoubtedly a better engineer. Craig Silverstein, too. And Bret Taylor. But if you're going to tell me Zuck is a mediocrity -- not just "a lesser light than Jeff Dean" but an actual mediocrity like us rank-and-file HN-posting losers -- then I'm gonna want to see some evidence.
Studying a language daily for four years suggests determination and willpower, yes.
But I would expect most people who have studied a language daily for four years to be able to give a talk in that language if they needed to and knew ahead of time. I'm not sure that's a non-average learning time.
Citations widely available via the obvious web searches. Here are responses on Quora with some details about how the hackers hired by Facebook worked around PHP's limitations.
I'm not aware of any evidence that he was an exceptional engineer. So what? Why would he even care about being that? As long as you can hire engineers that are better than you, you don't need to be a great one to grow a social network. We're not talking about AI here.
Having said that, I think Zuckerberg was a hacker. He made a few small web apps and one took off. His success shouldn't mean he is not a hacker.
That would make him an entrepreneur and a web programmer.
Not a hacker, which (in this context) is about a great relationship with programming than "making a few web apps".
That usually has more to do with machiavellianism than competence
Of course some would consider machiavellianism a kind of talent.
Interestingly, he enrolled in CS at a time it was believed to be a dead career, with offshoring replacing expensive American engineers.
Believed by whom? Because AFAIR this was never either the general public sentiment or consistent with BLS projections across the fields that CS feeds into.
Post dotcom crash in the early 00's? Everyone was saying this was a dead market. Cost-cutting was everywhere.
The options I was weighing were philosophy, math, or CS. I chose CS because I liked building things. I figured I could at least make minimum wage. If it turned out so terrible I could just go back to school for something else.
Much to my relief, my first job out of college paid me $50k.
The hilarity is that I went into Linguistics instead, and it turns out that in 2023 that is actually very helpful... I'm not the only one either.
I do remember it being a big concern on the part of 9-to-5 coders at large corporations.
Ew