John Carmack Leaves Meta • Hacker News Board

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#61

Post by mrtksn » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 1:15 AM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #28

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #5

“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…

> This pattern—massive outlays followed by poor, possibly-rushed possibly-underpowered workmanship—sounds remarkably like corruption. 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 them…

IMHO, that’s almost natural in large organizations, it’s just a function of the structure and worker KPI.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#62

Post by LASR » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 1:15 AM UTC

hajile wrote: post #29

modeless wrote: post #4

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…

I suspect he's going to get smacked hard by the AGI problem and ultimately concede defeat on his biggest goal while achieving some success in the current less-than-general ML stuff.

I don’t think you’d need to be alone in solving the AGI problem.

Carmack is an engineer at heart. I am sure there are some yet undiscovered technical blockers in that space that he will solve.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#63

Post by kentm » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 1:16 AM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #28

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #5

“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…

> This pattern—massive outlays followed by poor, possibly-rushed possibly-underpowered workmanship—sounds remarkably like corruption. 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 them…

I left FAANG basically because you had to play the politics and self-promotion game to get promoted. Woe be unto you if you worked on a "leaf" system -- something that consumed internal services but did not expose services to other engineering teams. You would have no internal engineers willing to vouch for your promotion because they weren't using your service or codebase. I really wanted to just execute and be rewarded without having to invest excess energy in marketing myself internally in the company.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#64

Post by giantrobot » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 1:16 AM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #28

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #5

“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…

> This pattern—massive outlays followed by poor, possibly-rushed possibly-underpowered workmanship—sounds remarkably like corruption. 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 them…

I think a lot of that is the unofficial stack ranking all the FAANGs are using. It always pays to self-promote since the marginal difference between you and another person on the team might be zero. But if you've been promoting yourself to your manager and the other team member hasn't, you get RSUs/bonus while they get a PIP. You can even have lower actual performance but if your self-promotion is better than their output you get rewards while they get a PIP.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#65

Post by yawnxyz » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 1:16 AM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #28

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #5

“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…

> This pattern—massive outlays followed by poor, possibly-rushed possibly-underpowered workmanship—sounds remarkably like corruption. 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 them…

it's so wild to me that FAANG has these hiring walls set up — like crazy coding challenges — only for the best engineers to then do work equivalent to what you see at gov't or consulting jobs.

Why do they make it so hard to work for them, just for their employees to play status games?

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#66

Post by qbasic_forever » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 1:16 AM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #59

qbasic_forever wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is AI really grifting? It's not like mom and pop can sink their savings into AI tech and lose it all to scams, etc. like they can with crypto. At worst some big investors sink a big seed round in and never get it back from a 'grifting' AI company--IMHO no real harm done, if you're an angel investor you're mature enough to deal with getting burned it's just part of the risk (and no one is going to cry for someone rich…

Your theory is that it isn't a scam if the people can afford to lose the money? That is certainly not how I think of them.

A scam implies malfeasance or fraud. There can be scam companies anywhere. What I'm saying is that AI is not inherently full of scammy companies, unlike say crypto. Sure AI tech is over-hyped but it isn't designed to defraud people.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#67

Post by pantalaimon » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 1:16 AM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #5

“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…

> It pains me to hear people say that they don't even get their headset out to show off at the company because they know it's going to be a mess of charging and updating before they can make it do something cool.

He has a point. The tens of billions of dollars seem to be mostly dedicated to adding invasive crap that makes the experience worse.

After the last update I had to "sync my Meta account" before I could do anything. I had to log in on the PC (with my headset on) and enter a code shown on the headset on my PC. Yea, that's fumbly.

Oh and after the latest update may play area is apparently too small for room scale mode, it always forces me back to stationary mode. What a mess.

This was after using the device just fine for two years without such boondoggle.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#68

Post by stephc_int13 » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 1:18 AM UTC

I am not surprised.

He is not leaving Meta to focus on AGI and build a new company.

This is other way around, he is so tired and disgusted that he is throwing the towel and focusing on something else.

This is not a vote of confidence.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#69

Post by a9h74j » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 1:19 AM UTC

LarsDu88 wrote: post #30

joenathanone wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is false. A shit ton of money can buy a ton of talent. Not Carmack level talent though, he made Doom and Quake so he's already a multi-millionaire. You need a metric ton of money to buy out Carmack, which is exactly what they did. 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 co…

> warped incentives

Has anybody suggested "term limits" as a solution? Not that I assume they would be.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#70

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 1:20 AM UTC

muglug wrote: post #35

johnwheeler wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a quest pro, and it’s pretty awesome. Zuckerberg made the argument that Microsoft spent about 10 billion on development of the first Xbox, and that turned out to be a good bet.

But in the case of the Xbox they knew there'd be an appetite for a gaming console, because gaming consoles had been selling like hot cakes for over 15 years. VR is a very differently-sized market.

[deleted]