
Will the Next Zuckerberg Be a Designer, not a Hacker? - turoczy
http://www.technologyreview.com/business/37449/
======
qq66
Zuckberg IS a designer. Facebook gained massive initial traction not because
it was technologically superior to other options (although it eventually ended
up being so), but because it was very well thought out from a product
perspective.

~~~
neworbit
The UX of Facebook beats the pants off Myspace, but still... doesn't strike me
as a triumph of design. Though to be fair this may just be because things
break more readily at a half billion users.

~~~
qq66
By design I don't mean rounded corners and typography -- I mean things like
limiting the networks to universities to begin with, having the Facebook graph
mirror real-life social networks, the timing and characteristics of News Feed,
Platform, Connect, etc.

~~~
kenjackson
That's not typically referred to as a designer. Those types of things
typically fall into the realm of a "program manager".

------
javery
The next Zuckerberg will be a hacker regardless of if he is a designer.

------
ashgoblue
I think designers will play a bigger role in founding teams in the future as
products need to be designed for various platforms such as touch tablets,
browser based web apps, mobile devices, etc. Each will require a unique set of
interactions and design elements.

------
dasil003
False dichotomy. What's happening now is that the barriers to both fields are
being lowered, and the youth coming up today has the opportunity to become
adept at both from an early age.

Granted, both fields require different thought processes and it's rare if not
impossible to be truly great in both, but that's not what a startup needs. A
startup needs a decent idea, fast execution, and hustle at all levels. Two
things that factor very little into developing traction are stunning design
and impeccable engineering. You want something that works and looks decent,
but it's more important to move quickly and achieve product-market fit.

------
nicetryguy
Lest we forget, the reason Facebook took off in the first place is Privacy.

The design changed every six months or so.

Ideas are a dime a dozen. To start a company such as Facebook, you must have
an intimate knowledge with how your product works. A 'Hacker' implies that
someone knows the internals of their program, a 'Designer' implies they know
how to make it look and feel nice.

The Hacker mentality works great for leading a company, knowing the ins and
outs and possible future situations. The Designer mentality does not, making
it look and feel nice.

The next Zuckerberg will be a hacker.

------
tuhin
The next big guy (let's not make the poor guy/girl follow someone else's
legacy) can be anybody who is great in either of Design, Programming or
Business and practically capable (if not 10X) in the other two.

If you are just a great hacker, you CANNOT be the next thing. If you are just
a designer, you CANNOT be the next big thing. And likewise.

Assumption: You do not have a team/cofounder that/who compliments your skills
totally and share the same vision.

------
rch
Seems like there is an anecdote somewhere about how, in the early days of
Google, an anonymous user would occasionally send the developers a message
that simply stated the number of elements (words/links/whatever) on the main
page, whenever that number went up. The developers took the implicit message
to heart and endeavored to keep the noise to an absolute minimum.

Do you need to be a designer to realize that simplicity is a virtue?

------
igorgue
I think that the mindset of Zuckerberg or the next Zuckerberg will be the one
of a hacker. Making him/her in fact a hacker.

What I'm trying to say is: Designers are hackers not in the software
engineering point of view but in the problem solvers one.

In my opinion he was successful early on not because of his exceptional
programming skills (although nobody said Facebook is the easiest thing to
develop), but because his "Product Designer" skills.

------
moondowner
This one is a hacker?

------
yamilg
What makes you think good designers are not hackers and that Mark Zuckerberg
is not also a designer?

------
mkramlich
Funny thing is that, especially early, Facebook didn't require particularly
good programming skills. But it did have a much better and more professional,
less sleazy (MySpace) or nerdy (LiveJournal) -looking UI than it's
competitors/progenitors did. And then grew in a very intelligent and
calculated away (Harvard first, then other Ivy League, then other colleges,
etc.; and refusing to commercialize the experience too early). All of that
really had nothing to do with the quality of the code or the main coder behind
it (Zuck). Quality of the designer (arguably, especially early on: Zuck) and
strategic direction (Zuck again?), but not of the hacking.

