Apparently, Mark Zuckerberg Still Writes Code

http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/14/apparently-mark-zuckerberg-still-writes-code/

by jasonlbaptiste • 16 years ago

90 55 16 years ago

philwelch3• 16 years ago

"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

wallflower2• 16 years ago

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

wheaties• 16 years ago

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.

contextfree• 16 years ago

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

akrito• 16 years ago

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...

aneesh• 16 years ago

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/...

cmelbye• 16 years ago

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?

jasonlbaptiste• 16 years ago

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.

baddox• 16 years ago

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.

philwelch3• 16 years ago

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.

blackguardx• 16 years ago

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.

bprater2• 16 years ago

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.

naz• 16 years ago

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.

andrewcooke• 16 years ago

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...

arijo• 16 years ago

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

koenigdavidmj• 16 years ago

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

res0nat0r• 16 years ago

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

axod• 16 years ago

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

pgbovine• 16 years ago

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)

wallflower2• 16 years ago

"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...

huangm• 16 years ago

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

waterlesscloud• 16 years ago

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.

chegra84• 16 years ago

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

niekmaas• 16 years ago

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.

edj• 16 years ago

> 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.

cookiecaper• 16 years ago

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.

jim-greer• 16 years ago

Dude, that's not Twitter.

qq66• 16 years ago

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

rabidgnat• 16 years ago

"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."

robryan• 16 years ago

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.

ojbyrne• 16 years ago

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.

rossover• 16 years ago

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.

dfj225• 16 years ago

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.

drp• 16 years ago

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

thorax2• 16 years ago

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

lrm242• 16 years ago

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

markkoberlein• 16 years ago

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.

bandhunt• 16 years ago

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

emehrkay• 16 years ago

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

gojomo2• 16 years ago

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

erlanger• 16 years ago

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.

randallsquared• 16 years ago

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.

blakeross• 16 years ago

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.

gojomo2• 16 years ago

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

swah• 16 years ago

Respect.

10ren• 16 years ago

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

flyosity• 16 years ago

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"?

Apparently, Mark Zuckerberg Still Writes Code

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