Facebook’s New Motto: “Move Fast And Please Please Please Don’t Break Anything”
1 HACKER WAY, MENLO PARK — Surrounded by a wall of posters emblazoned with bold red text, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a press conference today that it is changing its motto to “Move Fast And Please Please Please Don’t Break Anything.”
Facebook’s motto has changed many times since it was founded. At first, it was “Move Fast And Break Things.” Then, after years of growth and developers pushing a deluge of bugs, it became “Move Fast and Build Things.” In 2014, it became the much less catchy “Move Fast With Stable Infra.” Then it simply became “Move Fast.”
“We’ve come far from the cowboy days when Facebook was a small company… We’ve always emphasized the importance of moving fast and being unafraid to take risks,” Zuck said. “I don’t think this is going back on our principles as much it is an evolution. I like to tell some of our prospective hires that we’re like a startup with the resources of a big company, but we can’t tolerate careless interns breaking the site and lose us millions of dollars a minute.” He expressed confidence that the new motto would promote innovation, ensure a “delightful” experience for Facebook users, and motivate employees to “please for the love of god don’t break anything.”
Sources inside the company seemed resigned to the new state of affairs. “My diff has been in review for the last month because of nit-picky bikeshedding, and my tech lead literally sits behind me and watches over my shoulder to make sure that I’m not doing anything wrong,” said one employee who requested anonymity for this story. “Either you gotta spend time on making new things, spend time on making sure things aren’t going to break, or you increase the amount of total time by working harder. It’s like we’re a big company or something.”
At press time, Facebook shares were up two points.
