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John Carmack Leaves Meta

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Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#171

Post by kentm »

ablatt89 wrote: post #87
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…

Working for 2x FAANGs, management incentives engineers to work on new features and not on integration testing and optimization. Quality, testing, automation are highly looked down upon and generally don't give huge refreshers come review time. However QA, automation, and testing are not only looked down in FAANG, but the majority of companies and engineers. How often do you see engineers in any company call themselve…

You see it on Hacker News quite frequently too. Quite a lot of people here silo people into "builders" and "maintainers". They then exalt the builders and talk down the maintainers.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#172

Post by nequo »

makeitdouble wrote: post #135
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…

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.…

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

There was this case in 1996 and 1997 but this seems more the exception than the norm:

https://money.cnn.com/1997/03/14/technology/apple/

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#173

Post by version_five »

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.

That can be true, it's also definitely what people say at a failing org that has become bureaucratic and political and doesn't value technical skill. I have seen this first hand. There's such thing as an asshole that nobody can work with of course. But overall it's a red flag when accomplished people leave an org because "it's not for everyone".

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#174

Post by carabiner »

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…

There's a strong bias for "just world hypothesis" stories like this one. Someone wealthy has to be poor in other areas. Someone smart must also be dumb. In fairness, to strive for anything you must have faith in a just world, that your efforts won't just be dashed by bad luck or a cheater. That doesn't mean it reflects reality though. It's just a story to help us sleep at night.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#175

Post by carabiner »

yawnxyz wrote: post #65
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…

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?

If they are so bad, why are they so successful? Why hasn't anyone disrupted them with superior business practices and a better product?

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#177

Post by [deleted] »

zx8080 wrote: post #110
jackosdev wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked for the three largest mining companies in the world, and a much smaller miner before that. The small company had 1 geologist, 1 mining engineer, 1 general manager and an office admin person. The next place I went to was a similar sized mine with about 200 people in the office, and many more support people in the city. The resource was 1:1 coal to dirt and much higher quality, compared to the previous place w…

> I feel sorry for those FAANG engineers who can't break free from the golden handcuffs and actually do something valuable with their time. Maybe they just don't want to? Anyway. Don't be sorry. They get lots of money for almost nothing (in an engineering sense). And they have free time, so some of them they can do something valuable (incognito, of course. Otherwise faang lawyers come). It's the big enterprise manage…

[deleted]

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#178

Post by belfalas »

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"

Whoever those others are…they are irrelevant.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#179

Post by [deleted] »

jackosdev wrote: post #57
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 worked for the three largest mining companies in the world, and a much smaller miner before that. The small company had 1 geologist, 1 mining engineer, 1 general manager and an office admin person. The next place I went to was a similar sized mine with about 200 people in the office, and many more support people in the city. The resource was 1:1 coal to dirt and much higher quality, compared to the previous place w…

[deleted]
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