In Facebook’s early days, new developers got a congratulatory email for crashing the site

Aditya Agarwal, the vice-president of engineering at Dropbox, was a globetrotter from birth. His father, an engineer himself, traveled around the world for work, a journey which took him from India to Singapore, then Malaysia, and finally the United States. Outside of work, father and son would take apart household appliances, only to “sometimes” put them back together.

So it’s not surprising that Agarwal would wind up in Silicon Valley, a smorgasbord of cultures and personalities dedicated to the goal of building global tech companies. Back then, however, the Valley wasn’t exactly a honeypot for the best and brightest. Not to the extent it is today. The year was 2003, soon after the dot-com crash, and Agarwal had just graduated with a computer engineering degree from Carnegie Mellon.

“Wall Street in some sense had the imagination of America. It didn’t matter if you’re computer scientist, an electrical engineer, or a quantum physicist. If you’re smart, if you’re good with math, logic, and statistics, the idea was why not go make a lot of money on Wall Street?” he tells Tech in Asia during an interview in Singapore.

But he couldn’t relate to Wall Street, as he wanted to do something that creates intrinsic value. So, he packed his bags and joined Oracle, where he worked on projects like self-healing databases. But it wasn’t what he wanted, and in the end he started looking at other options. After a couple of introductions, he got to know a guy called Mark Zuckerberg, who was hiring engineers soon after Facebook’s series A round. He was sold. The company had around 10 employees when he joined, and was starting to see good traction – around 500,000 users in the campuses where the social network first got hot.

Congrats, you’ve crashed the site

Agarwal describes the early days of Facebook as being high energy and college-like, where employees would work and play video games. But more importantly, he liked how the startup was pioneering the “move fast and break things” ethos and putting it into practice.

“It’s an environment that’s extremely tolerant of people making mistakes and failing. But it’s not tolerant of a lack of intensity and hunger, of not pushing yourself hard,” he explains. And when he says that the company celebrates failure, they really do celebrate it.

The first time that somebody joins the company and introduces a bug that caused Facebook to go down, we will email out to all of the team and say: congratulations, you’re moving fast. Because the natural tendency is to be in a mode where you are afraid to make mistakes. You don’t want to fuck up. We needed to break that mentality and tell people that if you’re pushing yourself hard and moving fast, you are going to make mistakes. Unlike other companies, we want to celebrate that.

Engineers are also encouraged to push code to production as quickly as possible. At Oracle, Agarwal wasn’t exposed to the firm’s code until three to four weeks in. Instead, he was given a bunch of manuals to read. The implicit message they sent was that newcomers are noobs who need a lot of instruction before they can touch a complex system. Moving slow was okay. “I spent a year at Oracle, I did not push any code. The code I wrote eventually made it out, but two years after I left.”

In contrast, newcomers at Facebook were given a laptop on day one and they got to see the code immediately. They were assigned a bug to fix, and within a day or two they were able to able to make changes to the site that impact millions. The message is different: newcomers are treated just like everyone else, and that is empowering.