If you were to visit Facebook’s Menlo Park campus just a few years ago, you’d see the
company’s famous motto – “Move fast and break things” – plastered on the walls. It was born out of the company’s hacker mindset of young software engineers building a rapidly growing startup.
The ability to quickly deliver new features and functionality and put it into the hands of users was of paramount importance, even if it meant breaking a few things along the way.
Then all that changed.
At the company’s F8 conference in 2014, CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced a new motto:
“Move fast with stable infrastructure.”
It “may not be quite as catchy as ‘move fast and break things,'” Zuckerberg said. “But it’s how we operate now.”
“As developers, moving quickly was so important, we would even tolerate a few bugs to do it.”
Now that the company has grown to such mammoth proportions, spending time fixing bugs was slowing it down faster than its attitude towards development.
Today’s software engineering landscape is very different to the one we all knew several years ago.
The ability to speedily deliver software applications on a massive scale, while also maintaining consistently reliable user experiences is well within reach for every company.
Choosing between speed and quality is no longer necessary. These days, you can move fast and fix things too.
