How good of a programmer is Mark Zuckerberg?

He's an amazing CEO, one of the best in the world. But what about his programming abilities now. Does he still code sometimes for Facebook?

3 Answers

Prashant Kumar Singh, inquisitor ,Programmer & Web-application developer

16.1k Views

As pointed by most of the answers that he was not an extraordinary programmer. But he was hell better than that. He has capability to draw real life value from what he do. Take the example of any of his app development like face-mash, it gained recognition and i think showing world how to get benefit from something is better than just to develop it & no one knows what benefit it will do to them.

About his programming skills in early years:
    
Zuckerberg began using computers and writing software in middle school. His father taught him Atari BASIC Programming in the 1990s, and later hired software developer David Newman to tutor  him privately. Newman calls him a "prodigy", adding that it was "tough  to stay ahead of him". Zuckerberg took a graduate course in the subject  at Mercy College near his home while still in high school. He enjoyed developing  computer programs, especially communication tools and games. In one such  program, since his father's dental practice was operated from their  home, he built a software program he called "ZuckNet" that allowed all  the computers between the house and dental office to communicate with  each other. It is considered a "primitive" version of AOL's Instant Messenger, which came out the following year.[2]
According to writer Jose Antonio Vargas,  "some kids played computer games. Mark created them." Zuckerberg  himself recalls this period: "I had a bunch of friends who were artists.  They'd come over, draw stuff, and I'd build a game out of it." However,  notes Vargas, Zuckerberg was not a typical "geek-klutz", as he later  became captain of his prep school fencing team and earned a classics diploma. Napster co-founder Sean Parker,  a close friend, notes that Zuckerberg was "really into Greek odysseys  and all that stuff", recalling how he once quoted lines from the Roman  epic poem Aeneid, by Virgil, during a Facebook product conference.[2]
During Zuckerberg's high school years, under the company name  Intelligent Media Group, he built a music player called the Synapse  Media Player that used machine learning to learn the user's listening habits, which was posted to Slashdot[25] and received a rating of 3 out of 5 from PC Magazine.[26] Microsoft and AOL tried to purchase Synapse and recruit Zuckerberg, but he chose instead to enroll at Harvard in September 2002   (Source: Mark Zuckerberg - wikipedia).

         In Harvard also his major was not computer science, but he just use to attend lectures of courses  that he likes. This video may enlighten this a bit more