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John Carmack: Career Advice

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Re: John Carmack: Career Advice

#51

Post by sillysaurusx »

swyx wrote: post #43
sillysaurusx wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello! Feel free to DM me on twitter to talk. (I'm @theshawwn) I noticed some of your other comments, like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23737849 . If you're 20-something, just remember that life is pretty much supposed to feel listless. No one really knows what they're doing until they figure out what they want. And figuring out what you want is often very hard.

very kind of you to offer help where most of us down vote. this person does seem like they need someone to talk to.

I related with "my only friend is a few thousand miles away. We watch movies together and talk via discord." It's normal to end up in that situation. Or at least, I've been there.

I hope they'll take me up on the offer, since it's interesting to get to know people. I'd reach out to them directly, but there's no contact info in their profile.

Re: John Carmack: Career Advice

#52

Post by szszrk »

person_of_color wrote: post #2

Survivorship bias. Not everyone has the opportunity to be a programming geek at the beginning of a new era of PC gaming.

Have you read the whole thing? Because he actually refers to very different aproaches then his own. Says it's perfectly fine! He describes a modern way of creating software, with lots of tools and that's it's ok NOT to work as he is working.

Re: John Carmack: Career Advice

#53

Post by teddyh »

I prefer Richard Hamming’s series:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3msMuwqp-o&list=PLctkxgWNSR...

“I have given a talk with this title many times, and it turns out from discussions after the talk I could have just as well have called it "You and Your Engineering Career," or even "You and Your Career." But I left the word "Research" in the title because that is what I have most studied.”

Re: John Carmack: Career Advice

#54

Post by parasubvert »

swyx wrote: post #40
parasubvert wrote: post #37

I’d restate this advice as “be a specialist in several areas, start with one. Don’t be a generalist, while that is sometimes valuable, it’s not always.” It is good advice. I’m doing pretty well in my career at 43 as an individual contributor. Next year I’ll be earning $500k easily (and I don’t live in NY or SF). I started as a coop student out of university which helped me focus on individual specialties. One of my v…

his point is about tools OVER areas - it's good to specialize in an area but often that involves building your own tools from the ground up to really completely understand something. Specializing in tools, or as he calls it being a "tools master" at a company provides more immediate business value bc the tool probably has lesser known features that exist for a very good reason.

Yes. And sorry if that wasn’t clear, I learned the areas as a result of learning a tool very deeply as the priority, and then expanding from there.

You start with a tool and then build experience in the area so you can eventually make evaluative judgements.

Re: John Carmack: Career Advice

#55

Post by Frost1x »

simonh wrote: post #50
patrec wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think his argument is fairly simple: 1. Learning (fundamental) stuff deeply is the way to become great. 2. But knowing how stuff works fundamentally at an abstract level (e.g. being able to write your own toy OS) is not directly economically useful (and/or very time consuming to get to that stage). So it won't get you a job. 3. So for starters learn just one thing that people actually use (say git) deeply at a conc…

This closely matches advice I've been giving to new hires and team members for years. When you join a new team look for the gaps, what isn't getting done or what will benefit the team most and fill that gap. You're not going to compete with the current guru of this or that, so learn from them for sure but that's not going to mark you out. The only down side is there are often reasons those gaps are there, but it's ju…

I'd be a bit weary of gaps in some environments. As you suggest, those gaps often exist for a reason.

From my experience a lot of those gaps are essentially integration efforts between two systems where one person builds something independent of the other that were supposed to be integrated or are now desired to be integrated yet were never planned or designed appropriately to integrate. In the end, you end up needing to become a master of the disjoint pieces that formed that gap to connect them and have to deal with two 'masters' as opposed to one.

My suggestion is to find gaps that aren't integration efforts, if possible, that are instead extension efforts. This allows you freedom of creativity for some greenfield development while avoiding a bunch of legacy code and technical debt that will swallow you whole. It also gives you a starting leap from something developed by a master to work from.

I can't count how many times I've joined different teams to assist and found a pile of integration efforts (my sample may be biased, YMMV). This seems to be a more common modern phenomenon where people need to pump out something to look good/productive and then coast away before the challenging effort of making things work together occurs. I would say this issue is exacerbated by the mass adoption of "agile" where integration is always an afterthought since business leaders are often the dictators.

Re: John Carmack: Career Advice

#56

Post by dgb23 »

szszrk wrote: post #18
st1x7 wrote: post #8

Can anyone elaborate on what Carmack is suggesting here? To specialise in some tool early in your career? Or something else? I don't quite get it. (Or at least I don't get why it would be such a good idea.) Carmack is usually great to listen to, by the way; check out some of his interviews or talks if you haven't before.

He kind of explains it in the following tweets in thread. I think he says more or less: "I'm usually advocating for undestanding deeply the problem and being an expert in the matter, not in the tools that solve it that come and go quickly. But in reality it's ok to be learn the tool, as it also brings you knowledge on the same matter, eventually. It may not be as comprehensive, but it's still desired. And people who…

Interesting! I love debugging, writing (specs and docs), learning from others, teaching others (doing this part time rn), writing/tuning tools and libraries and refactoring. I sometimes wish I had more time for these things, I often have to overlook them in the face of time/budgets/features.

Re: John Carmack: Career Advice

#57

Post by gorjusborg »

eeks wrote: post #12
st1x7 wrote: post #8

Can anyone elaborate on what Carmack is suggesting here? To specialise in some tool early in your career? Or something else? I don't quite get it. (Or at least I don't get why it would be such a good idea.) Carmack is usually great to listen to, by the way; check out some of his interviews or talks if you haven't before.

I believe he means that by better understanding the tools, one better understands the trade.

With an added caveat that this is an indirect path to that knowledge, but perhaps a more job-compatible one.

Re: John Carmack: Career Advice

#58

Post by meheleventyone »

swyx wrote: post #41
meheleventyone wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always good to be aware of biases in people viewpoints when considering their advice but I'm not sure that's that applicable in this case because he's advocating people don't do what he did essentially. It's also as far as these things go pretty mediocre and obvious advice. The majority of the games industry today is focused on using and customizing a reasonably small set of tools rather than writing their own.…

is it mediocre if it's true? sometimes good advice is just truth stated simply.

Calling it mediocre is just calling it common or average and lacking in special insight not that it’s false. It’s good advice that anyone in the industry would give to people trying to break in.

Re: John Carmack: Career Advice

#60

Post by jokethrowaway »

parasubvert wrote: post #37

I’d restate this advice as “be a specialist in several areas, start with one. Don’t be a generalist, while that is sometimes valuable, it’s not always.” It is good advice. I’m doing pretty well in my career at 43 as an individual contributor. Next year I’ll be earning $500k easily (and I don’t live in NY or SF). I started as a coop student out of university which helped me focus on individual specialties. One of my v…

Thanks for sharing, it's so hard to find data on this!

If you don't mind sharing more, is that working for a single US company or is it contracting / your own company?

I'm at 1/3 of your income but I find it increasingly hard to grow from here. To be honest I wouldn't mind being an individual contributor in the future but I don't see my income raise much more than that (I'm in Europe and I literally don't know anyone making close to half a million as an individual contributor).

I guess FAANGs (and stock options) would be an option but my friends at Google / Apple / FB are not very happy. Mostly dull jobs unless you're in some lucky team, less flexibility (at least pre covid, now everyone is remote anyway), more politics, similar cash compensation but very valuable stocks (which is how you make money). Plus throwing away two months of my life to prepare for a dumb interview.

Instead I'm looking into kissing my IC's career goodbye, start a small tech business and try to grow that one.

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