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Comment by mehrdada | Hacker News Reader

The problem with the new motto is that it is uncontroversial. As Zuck himself once mentioned at Startup School, corporate mottos are valuable only if they are controversial, that is, "be honest" is not a valuable motto, because it is obvious and uncontroversial, whereas "Move Fast and Break Things" is not so: it says something about prioritization that not everyone agrees with, and thereby communicates where the company stands on this issue. Everyone wants to move fast as long as nothing gets broken. I agree that it is possible to leverage technology to move faster while keeping things less broken, but it does not change the fundamental dynamic that at some point, you will have to trade _some_ stability for speed, and the new motto does not take a stance on which one it prefers at all.

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Move Fast (and Break Things) is the unwritten motto of every mediocre dev shop out there (breaking things being an unintended side effect of moving fast). It's not controversial.

> ...is the unwritten motto...

Exactly, it's unwritten because no dev shop would explicitly market themselves as being willing to break things in the name of speed. It's an unfortunate side effect that they don't want to call attention to, whereas Facebook wears it as a badge of honor.

Facebook, where the users are the QA department

This is the most important point here. Facebook can afford to do this because their users don't care. No one really needs Facebook or depends on it to work at critical times. Most products are not like that. Imagine what happened if Gmail started doing move fast and break things. Oops some of your email vanished.

On the contrary, I have to believe they do care. Many here might not remember or know, but early on, Facebook was very unstable due to the sheer server load. Performance is still an important metric for them. It is why they created HHVM, Hack, and React.js.

How often do you hear of Facebook going down or breaking completely?

I agree, remember Twitter? It started getting popular quite a while ago, but servers couldn't handle the load which lead to a lot of down time.

Eventually, users just left twitter and they shut down the site a year later.

You say it like it's a bad thing.

Sure, break things when you're trying out a lot of new features. I get that, and for the user-facing side of Facebook, it makes sense. It doesn't make sense (and is extremely frustrating) when you apply the same principle to your third-party APIs.

It is perhaps controversial for people at the top not for a dev.

Its also the motto of many good companys. At least in my mind, move fast and break things, means that you iterate quickly and move into testing fast, to find the errors there.

This works of course better with exerimental APIs compared to things you have to put on CD and ship.

This is the problem with such mottos. "Move fast and break things" means exactly that, i.e. move fast and break things. It's just a catchy soundbite, nothing else. It's up to every one of us to fill in the missing meaning; therefore everyone arrives at interpretations he/she likes, which might not be the same interpretation as anyone elses.

Perhaps, but when it's applied companywide, it's a bad idea.

And in the "ships CDs" camp, we have Adobe and Microsoft, long held as bastions of robust, stable, well-tested software.

There are other camps too. Like software consulting firms building software for large enterprises like banks, insurance companies etc. The consequences of breaking things are all written down in very exact legal terms. It is not at all fun when a regression bug shows up.

As is Move Slow (and Break Nothing)

The irony is that moving fast is itself a side effect of breaking things. I've noticed that if you prioritize speed at the expense of quality, you get neither, but when you prioritize quality you tend to get both.

Well, given that "move fast and break nothing" does have that catchy je ne sais quois (at least to me) that makes a motto resonate, I'm assuming it is controversial in some way. Maybe not in whether it's a good idea but in whether it's even possible. I think it is a pretty controversial/shocking claim to say that you can move with startup efficiency without sacrificing the reliability that slow-moving large corporations with pointy-haired bosses seek. If the industry readily accepted that claim, the industry would look a lot different from how it does now.

The new motto just sounds like "Pay My Rent and Keep My Money"; sure, I'd like both of those things and it's certainly going to cause a stir that I'm claiming I'm going to do both, but it's not like it's actually a thing that can be done, and the attention people pay to the claim is largely confusion about what I even mean when I say that.

By contrast, "Pay My Rent and Empty the Account" actually tells you something about the direction I'm going in, and what I prioritize when picking my actions.

These things are what can be made of them. "Just woks" isn't controversial either. But, in a context that you demonstrate (1) this thing is possible (2) we can do it, here are examples (3) It's a priority to do this thing other people will just pay lip service to.

Controversial or not, mottos become cliche, doublethink lip service unless they don't become those things.

All the business school bullshit: missions statements, code of ethics, motto, synergies, teamwork, a culture of innovation, etc etc. All that stuff is actually real, it exists and it can be very helpful. It's also uncontroversial that it sounds like bullshit because the people saying it most often and loudest are bullshitters. It's like listening to a priest who read 'Become a Spiritual Guru in 30 Days or Less' and went at it.

It is controversial, because half a decade of software development has proven it to be an oxymoron.

If the solution for correctness is 100% automated test coverage, then your forward progress will have significant drag (every new feature should break many tests).

Any discussion w.r.t to automated test should not start with an extreme example of 100% coverage because everybody else already know that's not healthy.

100% code coverage still doesn't give you correctness.

Breaking things is time expensive too, plus it erodes trust.

Not breaking things can be time expensive if you do it late, but it doesn't have to if you do it early. If making sure you don't break something is time expensive then you're probably not building on a solid foundation and solid processes.

Be foundation first. Incurring the time expensive to build a foundation (process, infrastructure, software) that will allow you to move fast with stability IS controversial; because it's not the "hack" approach.

So I think your take on it is Break Nothing and Move Slow, that's how you would make that choice given what mehrdada said.

"Slow is smooth, smooth is fast"

Maybe the controversy here is the notion that it is possible to move fast without breaking anything.

So "don't be evil" is controversial?

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