The beat of a different drummer

In 1920s America, one-room school houses dotted the countryside everywhere across the country.  In those houses, older students were taught, then the younger while the older students did their classwork.  When instruction was finished to the younger, the older students then helped the younger students with their classwork.  In 1950s America, the cities had undergone a great migration from the rural areas.  In those school rooms, the teachers taught the students, allowed for classwork to be done, checked the work, gave more work to the students who performed to satisfactory standards while those who needed more work were grouped with the teacher for extra and remedial work.  In 1980s America, about 20 years after mandatory education had become law, school rooms followed a regimen in which the teacher gave group instruction, allowed time to do classwork, checked the classwork, gave homework, and while many worked on homework using class time, those who didn't do well when the class work was checked gathered to an area of the room to get more personal instruction.

The 20s, 50s, 80s, and any other decade to the present day has a lulling familiarity to it - configure the day or period so that students are presented a concept and given time - checked time, independent time, and reiterated time to understand a concept.  If an idea is drummed into the environment enough times, then most (meaning a majority percentage) in earshot of the drum beat would understand the idea.

How very different is the method used if you are an employee of Facebook.  Zuckerberg calls this the Hacker Way and he explains that method in his letter to his new investors.

The Hacker Way

As part of building a strong company, we work hard at making Facebook the best place for great people to have a big impact on the world and learn from other great people. We have cultivated a unique culture and management approach that we call the Hacker Way.

The word "hacker" has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I've met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.
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Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words "Done is better than perfect" painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping.

What's that again? Done is better than perfect? Zuckerberg obviously never heard clearly the drum beat method of the schools through the last two centuries.  But, you understand his Move Fast principle if you understand his method of the Hacker Way.  The second principle he wants his employees to abide by at FB is to Move Fast.

Move Fast

Moving fast enables us to build more things and learn faster. However, as most companies grow, they slow down too much because they're more afraid of making mistakes than they are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly. We have a saying: "Move fast and break things." The idea is that if you never break anything, you're probably not moving fast enough.

This is so foreign to someone who sits in the school houses around the nation, no matter what the decade, that (s)he probably missed its importance.  Break things, not sit and listen to a repetitive drum beat passively.  Move fast, not sit for repetitive lessons a week or two at a time moving through concepts at the pace of continents moving apart from each other 3 centimeters a year.

So who will work for Zuckerberg?  Not very many from the primary pool producing young people supposedly ready for the work force after satisfying drum beat requirements.