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John Carmack Leaves Meta

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Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#141

Post by kentm »

arcticbull wrote: post #79
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…

Their counter-argument is that leaf services like that without measurable impact aren't things the company should be investing in and it is up to the individual to recognize that and re-allocate themselves onto something that's actually aligned with the company's goals. You simply working on a project isn't useful to a company, what's useful is working on the right project. You get promoted and compensated more if yo…

This is a pretty condescending post that assumes quite a lot about my work.

> You simply working on a project isn't useful to a company, what's useful is working on the right project.

No, my project was measurably useful to the company. It wasn't useful for engineers, but it was useful for internal, non technical users.

I helped build a team from scratch and launch a product with high internal user satisfaction. But I was told that I needed, specifically, engineers from outside my immediate team to vouch for me. And I met with other people with the same problem and they told me "Don't work for products for business users."

As an aside the internal tooling for non-technical users was atrocious. Wonder why. :)

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#142

Post by Redoubts »

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…

> This was admittedly self-inflicted – I could have moved to Menlo Park after the Oculus acquisition and tried to wage battles with generations of leadership, but I was busy programming, and I assumed I would hate it, be bad at it, and probably lose anyway.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#143

Post by worldsayshi »

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

Metaverse as a general concept is not a bad aim and Meta seemed to have some interesting ideas.

But their presentation was clumsy at best and they had miles to go to convince critics that they were not aiming for a very dystopian interpretation of the concept. They failed spectacularly on the PR side. Probably enough to make their own engineers lose hope regarding both ethics and executive management.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#144

Post by throwabayhay »

lolinder wrote: post #126
throwabayhay wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"?

Just look in front of you. The monitor you are using right now. That's incredible technology. You think that would be possible if people did not care about engineering, having a number of peers around them across multiple levels of the organization that cared to a similar level?

EDIT: What I mean is, you need multiple passionate people across many levels to achieve that. If reward culture wasn't somewhat healthy, I don't believe this could work.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#145

Post by dinvlad »

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.

I think it depends on organization. In some good ones, politics and engineering align well. In most, they don't.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#146

Post by arcticbull »

kentm wrote: post #141
arcticbull wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their counter-argument is that leaf services like that without measurable impact aren't things the company should be investing in and it is up to the individual to recognize that and re-allocate themselves onto something that's actually aligned with the company's goals. You simply working on a project isn't useful to a company, what's useful is working on the right project. You get promoted and compensated more if yo…

This is a pretty condescending post that assumes quite a lot about my work. > You simply working on a project isn't useful to a company, what's useful is working on the right project. No, my project was measurably useful to the company. It wasn't useful for engineers , but it was useful for internal, non technical users. I helped build a team from scratch and launch a product with high internal user satisfaction. But…

> This is a pretty condescending post that assumes quite a lot about my work.

Sorry if it came across that way, that was not my intent.

> No, my project was measurably useful to the company. It wasn't useful for engineers, but it was useful for internal, non technical users.

If that's not what the company values, then that's not a project the company wants to incentivize you to make. If you choose to make it anyways, would you really expect them to reward you for it? It sounds like the issue was as I was suggesting, that what you were trying to solve for wasn't what the org wanted and wasn't what they were goaling you on.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#147

Post by [deleted] »

bluedino wrote: post #138
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"

[deleted]

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#148

Post by throwabayhay »

actionfromafar wrote: post #137
throwabayhay wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I don't understand this question, can you elaborate?

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#149

Post by nomel »

CursedUrn wrote: post #99
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.

Or, you could say that Meta is focused on an audience that doesn't have a highish end gaming PC, and have a relatively small budget (say $400), which is probably most. For realistic hardware spread, see: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

But, they do still support that type of user with AirLink/USB. Problem is, there's not enough of those users, so many of the developers target Quest users, which where the eyes are.

I think a step function in VR quality, which requires a step function in the number of eyes behind a powerful system, will come with PSVR 2.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#150

Post by sp332 »

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.

They don't exactly need a non-compete (those are hard to enforce in CA anyway), they can just buy any up-and-coming VR companies. And they do.
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