For Facebook 'Hacker Way' is way of life

This is the ethic that can lift fresh-faced college grads (or dropouts) to the highest echelons of the technology elite, or at least to a good job.

Cadir Lee, the chief technology officer at the company behind the biggest games on Facebook, said he "absolutely" refers to himself as a hacker. At Zynga, the hacker way means agility, the idea that "done is better than something that is theoretically better." It's not the end of the world, say, if a game isn't perfect when players first see it, or if it has a bug that needs to be fixed. Think of it as live TV.

"The charm of 'Saturday Night Live' is that every once in a while you see a boom mic, or they forget their lines or crack up," says Lee. "But it's better to get something out there and entertain than to not have any show."