Facebook founder's ode to 'The Hacker Way'

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg scolded people for being down on hacking Wednesday as he heralded an often misunderstood skill that was central to his company's ethos and success.

As he sought to raise $5 billion on Wall Street in the largest flotation ever by an Internet company, the 27-year-old king of social media dedicated a quarter of his 2,100-word letter to investors to explaining "The Hacker Way."

"The word 'hacker' has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers," his ode began.

"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."

Zuckerberg defended hacking as a much-maligned profession, although he never mentioned the work of shadowy computer hacker groups like Anonymous, and it wasn't clear if his central point was more one of definition.

"Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete," he said. "They just have to go fix it -- often in the face of people who say it's impossible or are content with the status quo."

As well as the geeky message, the letter shone a fascinating light on some of the inner workings of the notoriously secretive Palo Alto, California-based company, laying bare a hacker culture where "code wins arguments."

"Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win -- not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people," he said, describing it as "extremely open and meritocratic.

"To encourage this approach, every few months we have a hackathon, where everyone builds prototypes for new ideas they have," Zuckerberg said.

"At the end, the whole team gets together and looks at everything that has been built. Many of our most successful products came out of hackathons, including Timeline, chat, video, our mobile development framework and some of our most important infrastructure like the HipHop compiler."

Zuckerberg said all managers, even those not required to write code, had to go through a program called "Bootcamp" to learn the Facebook codebase and how the system worked.

"There are a lot of folks in the industry who manage engineers and don't want to code themselves, but the type of hands-on people we're looking for are willing and able to go through Bootcamp."