Mark Zuckerberg discusses Facebook's hiring plans in Seattle

It was supposed to be off the record, but Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg decided to share during a meeting with a few reporters last week at the company's Seattle office.

The wunderkind agreed to talk openly about plans for Seattle, letting a slice of Pagliacci's Margherita pizza go cold on his plate as the conversation veered into Facebook's internal culture and hiring strategy.

No targets were given, but Facebook is growing its engineering team about 60 percent a year. It could grow faster, but Zuckerberg, 27, doesn't want growth to overwhelm its culture.

Barely a year after it opened, the Seattle office has about 40 engineers. They're about to release several products, including improvements to Facebook's mobile site.

"There are so many good engineers up here — largely from Microsoft and Amazon traditionally, and then Google a bit more recently — and there's a good startup scene up here, so it's going really well," Zuckerberg said.

The Seattle office started partly because Facebook was recruiting people who wouldn't move to the Palo Alto headquarters. It's the only remote engineering office, aside from two people in Tokyo. "That's more of an apartment," he joked.

Asked about the career path for employees in Seattle versus Palo Alto, particularly product managers, Zuckerberg replied by explaining how the company has tried to cultivate a culture where people with different skills can lead projects regardless of their title.

"The leaders of a specific project can come from a lot of different disciplines," he said, explaining that that's in contrast to companies that are more hierarchical or led by product managers.

"Here it just depends on the person — there are definitely projects where the engineering manager is leading, and there are definitely projects where the PM is leading," he said. "We have as many where the tech lead on the project is leading ... there are even a bunch where a designer is leading. I think that's good, a good diversity."

Then he talked about how the company encourages people to "move quickly."

"The saying internally is to move fast and break things — not trying to break things, but it's OK if sometimes you break things because if you don't then you're probably not moving fast enough."

The point was that it still feels like a small company, which indirectly answered the question about career paths:

"I think that's one of the things that really characterizes working here," he said. "That won't be true necessarily forever ... but for now, I think that probably is the biggest thing that people feel working at the company, not necessarily the career path."

Asked about Seattle growth plans, Zuckerberg said the plan "is to try to hire really good people," then provided another glimpse of its culture.

"In studying the industry, it seems like a bunch of companies — Google, Amazon, Microsoft — had a lot of really quick growth years where they doubled in size, or some companies even tripled," he said. "I really just don't think a culture can sustain that, and so we've tried to grow the engineering team around 60 percent. Which is still very fast — it requires a lot of work to be done well — but it's a lot less than 100 percent."

Relative to Facebook's growth, "That 60 percent is actually pretty restrained."

This requires another kind of discipline.

"I think the way you do that is by making sure that every person that you hire is like, really good," he said, then joked about how every company says that, but Facebook has a formula.

"One thing you find in engineering is a really good person is like 10 times as productive as a pretty good person. I'm not talking about a bad person — I think bad people are negatively productive because of all the externalities of stuff that has to be cleaned up around them — but pretty good people, who would be the best engineer at a lot of companies."

The trick is to find the best of these pretty good people.

"If you make it so your recruiting process is optimized for getting the top 5 or 10 percent of those, then you can keep the company small. And I think that that actually is the strategy — it's like, how are you going to scale the company to be larger and still feel good?" he said.

"Obviously we'll hire a lot of really good people here ... that's more the plan."

Brier Dudley: 206-515-5687 or bdudley@seattletimes.com