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John Carmack did a 5 hr podcast with Lex Fridman recently [1]. Moving away from Meta seemed like something that had been happening slowly over a long period of time. [1] https://lexfridman.com/john-carmack/
Lex's guest list is absurd. I'm honestly not sure how he's managed to pull it off.
Based on that hour-long talk, I'd say Carmack just had a fundamentally different set of priorities. He seemed to be focused on latency and scale, where Meta seems to be pivoting to fidelity and graphics.
> He seemed to be focused on latency and scale, where Meta seems to be pivoting to fidelity and graphics. Which makes sense, you want your users to be able to really take in the graphical glory of the Metaverse.
There is a pay wall, so I haven't read the article. I just want to put it out there: Did this seem predictable to anyone? I had the sense he was unsatisfied and Meta's public perception, particularly in Carmack's department, seemed to be plummeting. It seemed very likely that this would happen, but maybe I'm projecting too much. I imagined myself being deeply ungratified in his role.
It always seemed like a poor fit to me. From the begining, Facebook has always been an unctuous, slimy organization and Carmack seems to be a relatively high-integrity human. I'm honestly surprised it lasted as long as it did.
At some point you have to decide whether it’s worth it to keep fighting.
There is a pay wall, so I haven't read the article. I just want to put it out there: Did this seem predictable to anyone? I had the sense he was unsatisfied and Meta's public perception, particularly in Carmack's department, seemed to be plummeting. It seemed very likely that this would happen, but maybe I'm projecting too much. I imagined myself being deeply ungratified in his role.
https://assayviaessay.blogspot.com/2014/03/virtual-spaces-re...
“During Meta's developer conference in October, Carmack hosted a solo hour-long talk about the company's Oculus or Quest headset. He admitted he had many things to be ‘grumpy’ about, like the company's rate of progress on technological advancements and the basic functionality of the headsets. He said it was frustrating to hear from people inside Meta who found the Quest 2 headsets so unreliable that they refused to u…
Or the typical poor execution at extremely large tech companies. Where various people have incentives that aren't aligned with the overall objective of making a good product. Instead people are incentivized to empire build and be self serving.
He just founded a new company called Keen Technologies to work on AGI. Not surprising that he wants to focus on that now. He's been part-time at Meta for years. I'm interested to find out what kind of business model he's planning for an AGI company. Edit: he posted his leaving message publicly here: https://www.facebook.com/100006735798590/posts/pfbid0iPixEvP... Additional public comments on Twitter here: https://twi…
Well, I guess not anymore.
“During Meta's developer conference in October, Carmack hosted a solo hour-long talk about the company's Oculus or Quest headset. He admitted he had many things to be ‘grumpy’ about, like the company's rate of progress on technological advancements and the basic functionality of the headsets. He said it was frustrating to hear from people inside Meta who found the Quest 2 headsets so unreliable that they refused to u…
I worked at a medium-sized company that went through a phase of hiring ex-FAANG people, thinking we'd improve our quality by implementing FAANG practices.
It did the opposite: The ex-FAANG people were absolutely masterful at self-promotion, office politics, and collecting wins for themselves while shifting blame for anything that didn't work.
The strange thing was that many of them were actually good programmers when it came down to it. It seemed like they had been conditioned by their FAANG employers to put self-promotion and survival above everything else, which turned into an extremely toxic trait once they were removed from FAANG managers who were playing the same game. The company had to steadily ratchet down the levels of trust and independence granted to teams, while steadily increasing the amount of management oversight and process to keep them within bounds.
Now whenever I see famous builders and founders leave FAANG companies out of frustration, I get it. The big tech company game has deviated very far from execution.
He just founded a new company called Keen Technologies to work on AGI. Not surprising that he wants to focus on that now. He's been part-time at Meta for years. I'm interested to find out what kind of business model he's planning for an AGI company. Edit: he posted his leaving message publicly here: https://www.facebook.com/100006735798590/posts/pfbid0iPixEvP... Additional public comments on Twitter here: https://twi…
“During Meta's developer conference in October, Carmack hosted a solo hour-long talk about the company's Oculus or Quest headset. He admitted he had many things to be ‘grumpy’ about, like the company's rate of progress on technological advancements and the basic functionality of the headsets. He said it was frustrating to hear from people inside Meta who found the Quest 2 headsets so unreliable that they refused to u…
All the money in the world can't buy talent. If the talented people don't want to work for or with you, then you end up just burning through cash while the untalented/less talented deliver a subpar product.
The problem with Meta is the same as the problem in any mega corporation at that scale -- warped incentives.
The incentive to spend all your time politicking your way up the massive corporate ladder outweighs the incentive to improve the actual product: https://mentalmodels4life.net/2021/01/04/safi-bahcalls-innov...
There's even an equation that describes this phenomenon