According to a story in New York Magazine about young programmers, Zuckerberg stays away from the code (probably because he has better things to worry about, like the privacy of Facebook users). Feross Aboukhadijeh, former Facebook intern and creator of YouTube Instant, told NY Mag:
But, as the Groups team was adding the finishing touches to its product, Zuckerberg said he wanted to write a few lines. “Everybody was like, Ohhhh, Zuck’s gonna write code,” says Feross. Someone set up an easy bug for him to fix — adding a link to a picture, or something — and he went to work. Five minutes passed. 20 minutes. An hour. “It took him like two hours to do something that would take one of us who’s an engineer like five minutes.”
I can see the whole scene: Sweat dripping down his face, hoodie loosening, face flushing. Panic. Pain. Ulcer-causing stress. My soldiers are staring at me, judging me, leaving me for Google he must’ve been thinking. Then some lowly nice-guy tells him, “Oh it’s OK, Mark, you don’t have to finish this, we’ll just put it on the new guy.” He screams back, “IF YOU INVENTED FACEBOOK, YOU WOULD’VE INVENTED FACEBOOK” and then storms away into the arms of Justin Timberlake. End scene. [NY Mag via Kottke]
Awnshegh
Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 8:39 AMCoding is like anything else. If you don’t practice you get rusty. Wouldn’t expect anything else.
Matt L
Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 9:19 AMI was out of the game for a while, took me a bit to get back into the swing of it, however, after I left and come back, I had a whole new approach to coding, I’ve become a better coder for it.
Andrew
Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 9:27 AMI’d rather be a rusty coder and a billionaire than a leet coder and broke.
Francis
Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 9:47 AMAgreed. Also, you can’t expect someone with fresh code to know how the principle/fundamental implementation.
Peter
Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 9:35 AMMaybe if he kept his involvement up, they wouldn’t have made so many design mistakes on their website and android app.
awallafashagba
Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 9:48 AMMy gosh ! doesn’t have tower blocks of cash to spend instead of a whacking out some daft tag code … sheesh !
jeremy
Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 10:18 AMThe interns has probably written crap code that was hard to grok. The Zuck probably took an hour just to understand the buggy undocumented spagetti shite he has witnessing. And like everybody said, you get rusty, but just like riding the proverbial bike it come back to you real fast when needed if you where hard core for years (which zuck was). I code maybe twice a year in anger these days, but one week in I am gold, even with an unfamiliar language – the tricks of coding take time to learn, less code for more impact. On top of that an experienced coder can code in pretty much any language from Lisp to C# ,and can probably build a small language when needed.
The intern should show more respect – zuck built facebook, the intern coded 0.00001% of a mature app with no architectural impact and fetched coffee. Snotty lil turd – I would fire his ass back to uni, after putting him on UAT 24×7 for a month:-)
Sicarius123
Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 10:32 AMWhat?
Do you pray to the gods of facebook every night?
jeremy
Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 11:22 AMnope, just speculating based on experience. Young “gun” coders like Feross are either brilliant (0.001% prob) like zuck or lethally bad and unaware of the damage they leave in thier wake. Feross might be in the first category, but his bravado is no guarentee of that (from experience).
jeremy
Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 10:29 AMMake sense now the quote is from Feross Aboukhadijeh, who is the dude behind http://ytinstant.com/ and a classic example of a mashup writer getting above his station. Zuck apparently likes him a bit, so I guess his jibes are more in the tolerated smart-ass rookie category. The NY mag article is a good read :-)
Geoff
Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 10:50 AMWell that’s it then. He’s washed up. A failure. He should just give up and try to retire on what humble savings he may have cobbled together over the years.
THXultra
Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 12:00 PMHe’s like Bill Gates then
trace
Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 4:36 PMI was going to say “Didnt Gates code until almost the end? Never wanted to stop learning, always wanted to be the best etc”
Richard
Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 5:08 PMUnderstanding the existing code is the challenging part however even if adding a link is a trivial thing in itself. Of course the engineers would do it quicker, they spend 8 hours a day in the code so they know where to look and have a decent idea of the repercussions of touching certain things.
If Mark hasn’t been coding for the project recently then he would have a fair bit to catch up on. I doubt that engineers first case took him 5 minutes to implement when he first joined.
Mihamina Rakotomandimby
Wednesday, September 14, 2011 at 2:33 AMThat might be why they choosed to go on with PHP… I would have choosed another language… Say “Ocaml” (There is an impressive web framework now…: “OCsigen”)
Ankaz
Wednesday, September 14, 2011 at 12:53 PMChose* and Chosen*