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John Carmack Leaves Meta

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Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#121

Post by chrisbaker98 »

rhaps0dy wrote: post #102
chubot wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish Elon didn't get sucked into culture wars, because slimming down Twitter's workforce wasn't a bad idea I fantasized about someone buying Google and slimming it down too, because it used to be a great place to work (I worked there for over a decade). There were lots of great builders but they got drowned out by careerists In fact I worked in the SF office around "fail whale" times at Twitter (2009), and there wa…

> fail whale do you mean "whale fall"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_fall

Back in the day, Twitter's error page showed a cartoon picture of a whale, which became nicknamed "the fail whale". The fail whale was a common sight on Twitter circa 2009 because the site couldn't scale fast enough to match the demand and errors were frequent - that's the era GP is referring to by the fail whale times.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#122

Post by croes »

rhaps0dy wrote: post #102
chubot wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish Elon didn't get sucked into culture wars, because slimming down Twitter's workforce wasn't a bad idea I fantasized about someone buying Google and slimming it down too, because it used to be a great place to work (I worked there for over a decade). There were lots of great builders but they got drowned out by careerists In fact I worked in the SF office around "fail whale" times at Twitter (2009), and there wa…

> fail whale do you mean "whale fall"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_fall

https://www.techopedia.com/definition/1987/fail-whale

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#123

Post by posharma »

Arjuna wrote: post #111

”It has been a struggle for me. I have a voice at the highest levels here, so it feels like I should be able to move things, but I'm evidently not persuasive enough. A good fraction of the things I complain about eventually turn my way after a year or two passes and evidence piles up, but I have never been able to kill stupid things before they cause damage, or set a direction and have a team actually stick to it. I…

Success in the corporate world requires more than technical prowess. One of those things is influence. It's not for everyone.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#124

Post by Gatsky »

nebulous1 wrote: post #15
sxg wrote: post #10

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.

He has the quality of being unformidable. The guests are very relaxed on his show I find. Tim Ferris is similar. Contrast to say Sam Harris, who although very erudite, perspicacious and articulate, asks paragraph long multipart questions and spends around 50% of his air time talking. Tyler Cowen is a better example of a formidable interviewer, who keeps things quite short and punchy and is always a little lighthearted.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#125

Post by yarpen_z »

humanizersequel wrote: post #77
LarsDu88 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly his guest list is so good, I thought for several years that he must be working for the Kremlin and honeypotting folks behind the scenes (or something)

>Kremlin I take seriously the idea that Lex has an under-the-table relationship with government, but if you think the Kremlin is the likely suspect I've got a VR headset to sell you...

For someone who constantly applies bothsideism in the discussion of the Ukraine war and uses "Putin's regime" and "Zelensky's regime" in the same sentence (you can find an example in a very recent interview), I'd say he's not doing a good job of being a US government shill.

(Yes, I know that the original meaning of the word regime does not necessarily imply dictature, his intensions there were very clear and open - there are both sides and they are somehow comparable).

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#126

Post by lolinder »

throwabayhay wrote: post #96
kentm wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 beca…

We have multiple people giving their anecdotes saying big tech positions emphasize self-promotion, and one anecdote (yours) saying they don't.

So, sincere question: for those of us who haven't worked at a FAANG, why should we believe that your experience is the norm while the other people's is the "corner"?

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#127

Post by slimginz »

JohnFen wrote: post #94
wpietri wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh Meta 100% has some sort of non-compete in writing, especially after his lawsuit with Bethesda when he left Id to work at Oculus[1].

[1] https://www.pcgamer.com/zenimax-accuses-john-carmack-of-thef...

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#128

Post by [deleted] »

Arjuna wrote: post #111

”It has been a struggle for me. I have a voice at the highest levels here, so it feels like I should be able to move things, but I'm evidently not persuasive enough. A good fraction of the things I complain about eventually turn my way after a year or two passes and evidence piles up, but I have never been able to kill stupid things before they cause damage, or set a direction and have a team actually stick to it. I…

[deleted]

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#129

Post by nomel »

annadane wrote: post #78
cokeandpepsi wrote: post #13

I actually thought facebook was doing a ok job with oculus until the whole 'metaverse' social push happend it feels like the people invovled are serverly deteacted on what people want out of VR in general it's hard for me to imagine someone like carmack prefering to work in a envinronment like that (tearing down corp/product walls) vs building his own team and trying to solve technical challenges

Forcing a mandatory Facebook account is "doing an ok job"...?

There is no mandatory Facebook account, anymore. It's now a mandatory Meta account. Facebook is only linked if you want it to be. Meta has said that this was in response to disapproval of the mandatory Facebook account.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#130

Post by diab0lic »

rhaps0dy wrote: post #102
chubot wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish Elon didn't get sucked into culture wars, because slimming down Twitter's workforce wasn't a bad idea I fantasized about someone buying Google and slimming it down too, because it used to be a great place to work (I worked there for over a decade). There were lots of great builders but they got drowned out by careerists In fact I worked in the SF office around "fail whale" times at Twitter (2009), and there wa…

> fail whale do you mean "whale fall"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_fall

The commenter likely meant “fail whale”[0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter#Outages

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