It's not as though being the Harvard kid writing the first version of thefacebook.com is the same as running a large company; as if Zuckerberg can just hire people to do hard coding for him and that's the end of it. I thought I'd point out that building Facebook as a company is something that would have been, and is, hard. The inability to grow has killed promising web businesses.
I don't understand why I'm being downvoted and you're being upvoted.
Addendum: the downvotes continue. Someone explain what I'm missing, please.
seldo covers this in his original post. The assertion (correct or otherwise) is that the difficult parts of scaling Facebook occurred after Zuck stopped working on the code himself.
Good god it is outrightly ridiculous. Yes, I am a Zuck fanboy. At least I can admit it and cite a few reasons why. All I keep hearing from the other side is "omg all he's got is a freakin php site". Yeah, that's why he is a billionaire and you are not.
People keep saying "all Zuck did was scale". DOH! Scaling is what separates McDonalds from your local burger joint and facebook from millions of other php sites. If scaling is all Zuckerberg has done, good for him! That is all he should be doing.
> That he did not solve the biggest scaling problems and instead let
> his employees do that(ever wonder how they attracted those
> employees in first place)?
Personally, I think the idea that he is some sort of 'hacker genius' stems from the fact that the vast majority of the people that use Facebook, are probably the same type of people that thought I was a 'hacker genius' for showing them how to change their wallpaper or use Alt-Tab to switch between windows.
It comes down to some equation like:
do something related to X + gain success/fame/money = genius at X
Other people posts here seem to just be related to fighting the assertion that Zuckerberg gave Facebook success due to some genius piece of code. This assertion detracts from all of the rest of the stuff that made Facebook a success (business decisions, etc), any one of which had the potential to sink Facebook.
tl;dr Zuckerberg did a lot of things and made Facebook through a lot of hard work, but the moniker 'genius hacker' is not fitting. That is not a criticism of Zuckerberg so much as it is a criticism of the MSM (or just people in general) trying to boil the success of Facebook down to a single thing (the code) and claim that Zuckerberg's success must make him a genius at the one thing.
http://www.forbes.com/profile/mark-zuckerberg
That said, I can't see anybody in this thread being jealous or criticizing Zuckerberg. People are merely stating that his accomplishments do not automatically make him a "genius hacker" just because his very successful business happens to have to do with "computers".
seldo was referring to scaling the software system, not the business. cynicalkane is making a valid point here: that Zuckerberg was not only faced with the technical problems of scaling a popular website, but also with those of managing a fast growing company.
Scaling the business side is definitely another strength of Mark's, but I don't think it was a contributor to their early success -- certainly not the first six months covered in the movie, where it appears Parker was the one who knew how to get deals done. Of course, the movie is fiction, so who knows really?