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The Zuckerberg Syndrome
- veb 16y agoI always thought a hacker was someone who wrote black magic code in a language I thought I knew well. ;)
- danbmil99 16y agoWhy is this the Zuckerberg syndrome? Is he supposed to be a super-hacker? I thought he was more like a casual hacker marketing guy in the right place/right time.
- redrory 16y agoMy initial thoughts on Zuckerberg was that he was technically brilliant. But maybe "The Social Network" gave me the wrong impression.
- thinkcomp 16y agoThe Social Network gave you the wrong impression. Perhaps this is a better definition "Zuckerberg Syndrome," i.e. the condition of thinking that a person is smarter than they really are simply because they are rich. (It probably originated with Gates, in reality.) Anyway, Mark is smart, but so are a lot of people. And Chris was the marketing guy who got the site in the Crimson with impressive frequency, not Mark.
- redthrowaway 16y agoBoth Zuckerberg, and especially Gates, are really, truly, brilliant people.
- thinkcomp 16y agoYou may have missed my point. I have met both. Again, they are both smart, but many people are smart. Many people who read Hacker News are technically capable of doing what each of them has done. Of those, very few were also able to benefit from a number of the external forces that supported each of them, and fewer still would actually want to do what each of them did. So while they both may be quite intelligent people, they are not the most intelligent people ever to have lived, and are probably not even close. Being "brilliant" and being rich are not the same and there is no causal link in either direction!
- huertanix 16y agoThere are many brilliant people, but their time gets sucked away by Minecraft. It takes brains and balls to start a successful company.
- 3pt14159 16y agoGates took Math 55 and called it a "neat experience". Dude is exceptionally intelligent.
- qq66 16y agoZuckerberg is technically great but not great enough to have led the scaling of Facebook. Part of what he did so well was bring in the right people to help him handle the technical requirements of scaling Facebook.
- artmageddon 16y agoMy personal opinion is that Zuckerberg is damn smart, but as thinkcomp points out below, he shouldn't have a monopoly on the "syndrome" as there are a ton of smart people out there who we haven't heard of. I remember reading articles on HN and elsewhere about a fellow who managed to write drivers for the Kinect within a day or two after launch. To me, stuff like that is ludicrously smart. Edit: From the article(I went back and reread it): "Reading HN for the pass 3 years, you come across smart if not brilliant "hacking" minds. People who build projects in a weekend that would take me months. I got sucked into the belief that unless I had unbelievable programming skills I will not be able to create anything worthwhile. I call it the Zuckerberg Syndrome." After reading it again, I'm not sure what exactly the "syndrome" is here. Is it putting someone like Zuckerberg on a pedestal and thinking, "I can't match that so why try?" I think a lot people are affected by that sort of thinking in many facets of life. It's important to keep in mind that Facebook was NOT built in a day or weekend, for that matter. It took a lot of time.
- forensic 16y agoWhat sets both Zuckerberg and Bill Gates apart is their will to power. Neither of them are expert hackers. Both of them worked very very hard to get rich. Both of them desperately wanted to get rich. Both of them seized an opportunity when it presented itself. Both of them understood the business environment and understood what aspect of that environment they needed to exploit and emphasize in order to get wealthy. But neither of them are great hackers. Quite the opposite... RMS is a great hacker. Zuckerberg was a dime-a-dozen php monkey. Bill Gates was just your average chess club nerd.