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John Carmack Leaves Meta

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Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#91

Post by time_to_smile »

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…

> The big tech company game has deviated very far from execution.

This is yet another reason why I'm certain the whole metaverse project will fail.

If this moonshot had any chance of succeeding, the only way is to give this project entirely over to a someone who is passionate about the vision and has an incredible track record of execution.

Even if it where the case that Carmack where being ignored I would feel like that's a bad sign, but him being driven out by the culture means that nothing of substance will really happen. Certainly not the industry changing break through they're hoping for.

In the last decade Meta has had no impressive, game changing releases (unlike say Apple that has several), clearly the current culture is not great at solving hard problems. Sticking with that culture to see something like the metaverse through is hopeless.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#92

Post by johnwheeler »

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.

What are you talking about. They sold 100M quest 2s. People like it. Have you tried it? Most naysayers haven’t even tried it.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#93

Post by worldsayshi »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #25
srajabi wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a small company veteran -it absolutely happens at that level as well.

Company politics makes me amusingly think that tech building would be so much more efficient if we had basic income. Then perhaps people would be deincentivized to show up for work where they didn't care about the output. And everyone who did show up are there to get something very specific done.

You get less people but you might get people who are there for the right reasons. Kind of like OSS.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#94

Post by JohnFen »

wpietri wrote: post #72
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…

It's very interesting to me that he's giving up on VR entirely. If he thought it was just an issue with Facebook, presumably he'd jump in somewhere else and get the impact he was looking to have. That's another sign to me that VR is once again not going anywhere. Or rather, half of it isn't. Oculus-style VR is two best in one: 3D persistent virtual worlds and stereoscopic facehugger interfaces. The former has had gre…

It wouldn't surprise me if he has a noncompete in play that prevents him from continuing his VR work for a few years.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#95

Post by Philip-J-Fry »

coffeebeqn wrote: post #14
etchalon wrote: post #11

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’s probably the best graphics programmer in the world so I would trust his read on the priorities over whatever Meta manager handles that project

John Carmack says himself he wasn't even the best graphics programmer at Id. He was very good at the problem of game development in general and very good at optimising for performance specifically.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#96

Post by throwabayhay »

kentm wrote: post #63
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 rewa…

> I left FAANG basically because you had to play the politics and self-promotion game to get promoted.

I have no reason to doubt that in the particular corner of your organization that may well have been the case, but you cannot generalize this over the whole field. As stated elsewhere, I never played any game to be promoted, I simply never consciously sought the goal of promotion, and I was promoted anyway just because of the real, substantial job I did.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#97

Post by nomel »

torben-friis wrote: post #71
Gigachad wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they might be right in the long run but that they are pushing it too hard when it’s not ready yet. People probably do want to collaborate in virtual rooms at work, but only when it’s better than video calls. Which it currently isn’t. And they don’t want to do it in a world controlled by zucc

I still can’t see what I’d be supposed to do during a work vr “call”. A physical meeting already has everyone looking at a whiteboard or screen, which is already solved by screensharing. Even if you could fully recreate the experience of being in a physical room, what are you supposed to gain from that?

I don't know if you've tried co working in VR, or VR meetings, but "presence". Hearing a voice coming from a low resolution tile in a Webex is very different than having some resemblance of a human sitting at the same table, where they can look at you, smile, and you see them talking and hear their voice coming from them.

I much prefer VR meetings to Webex. Webex feels like a glorified shared phone call. VR feels like an actual gathering. With working at home, I think the "gathering" part of it has value, to me. If there's a break, I just look at my computer screen right in front of me, in VR.

But, some people don't like change, so I think it's somewhat doomed, especially with the "older" crowd. I don't say or mean that in a derogatory way, because I see it in myself all the time, and it's more of a contextual optimization than a shortcoming. Some people have been doing Webex for decades, have mentally mastered that context, feel comfortable in it, and don't want to even try VR.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#98

Post by JohnFen »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #66
wpietri wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Over-hyping is defrauding people.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#99

Post by CursedUrn »

etchalon wrote: post #11

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.

Meta definitely isn't focused on fidelity and graphics. Their mobile VR push degraded VR graphics significantly.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#100

Post by mesozoic »

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 wonder if I work at the same company you describe.
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