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John Carmack Leaves Meta

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Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#131

Post by alostpuppy »

sublinear wrote: post #46
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…

For what it's worth this also happens at smaller tech companies where the product is highly profitable and every department is siloed.

This is an interesting thought.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#132

Post by pengaru »

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…

The bigger the ship the smaller your rudder is.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#133

Post by throwaway019254 »

posharma wrote: post #123
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.

You mean politics.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#134

Post by sharkweek »

JohnFen wrote: post #56
santoshalper wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of the many things that cooled my interest in VR, the presence of Facebook in the space is near the top.

Agreed and maybe this is a little naive of me but I don’t currently own or plan on owning an oculus but if it was still an independent product via its original founders, I’m almost certain I’d have one.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#135

Post by makeitdouble »

chubot wrote: post #75
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 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…

I’m not sure we’ve ever seen a giant company successfully “slimming down” ?

Sure, some go though catastrophic downfall and miraculously rebound from there, but that feels more like throwing someone down a mountain with a only a bottle of water and see if they can make it back to civiliation.

The more natural cycle would be frustrated workers moving out to make their own company and build something better from there. In the current climate that doesn’t work because of mono/duopolies and corruption, but that should be the thing to strive for IMHO.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#136

Post by lyu07282 »

Gigachad wrote: post #50
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

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 don't really think that's it, I feel like there is enough prior art (Second Life, VRChat, AltspaceVR, etc.) that we know this has potential and is feasable. Its just that their technology isn't even remotely competitive with anything. Its all just a clunky, buggy, uninspired mess.

Its everything from their corporate design story that bleeds into every world and avatar, the laughable visual programming tools to create worlds, the proprietary walled-garden approach to horizons, the privacy nightmare that is horizons, the operating system being this hacky unstable Android fork (don't ever look at logcat). Its like every single step of the way they made the wrong decisions and executed on them incompetently, no money in the world is going to fix this mess.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#137

Post by actionfromafar »

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…

You could have said “in that particular leaf of the organisation”. Did you work in a leaf?

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#138

Post by bluedino »

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…

He might be considered by others as "boomer" that hasn't been relevant "since Quake III"

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#139

Post by lyu07282 »

nomel wrote: post #129
annadane wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which naturally, if you don't create a Meta account till January they are gonna delete all your purchased vr apps.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#140

Post by pengaru »

"He is a well known and regarded game designer, who moved to a new consulting role at Oculus in 2019"

Err, WAT? In the context of gamedev, game design is not what I'd say Carmack is known for. He's firmly in 'down in the weeds implementation detail and optimization' territory. How does one write anything about Carmack and get something so fundamentally wrong about who he is and what he's done professionally?

Game designer credit in this context (id software) generally goes to Romero, if anyone.

Edit: Just look at Carmack's wikipedia page FFS, he hasn't been credited for design since SOFTDISK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack#Games

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