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John Carmack Leaves Meta

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Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#191

Post by ww520 »

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…

He believes that AGI is an engineering problem because of the vast compute resource required for it. Being an engineering problem he believes he can make an impact.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#192

Post by numpad0 »

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…

It's just infinitely more profitable to build up social capitals and leverage network effects and stage wins in this world, where economic utility is determined purely by subjective judgements and payments are autonomously collected. It makes no sense to construct a municipal road bridge when $15 gratuity transaction for 5% conversion from a social media post with million Likes pays more. Fortunately we are not there yet, but not far away either.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#193

Post by nobodyandproud »

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?

So FAANG has set themselves up to hire retain sharp STEM grads who are savvy at politics.

That’s a very small subset of the STEM population.

Small anecdote : I’ve noticed that Ivy leaguers tend to be very polished and particularly good at the game.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#194

Post by vkou »

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…

I don't work at Meta, but I assume that, like any other bureaucracy

It's a large company, with home-grown political feifdoms - and technical merits for ideas aren't good enough to get things your way. Even if he is a big cheese in the world of actually knowing things, that doesn't really matter to his executive peers.

You need to both know things, and be very good at politicking to be successful.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#195

Post by chubot »

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.…

Yeah I was thinking about this thread about Apple in 1996 or so:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33289954

A few people including myself remarked how it sounded like Google now

And I noted that I don't think Google will "ever" slim down, because they're making money and Apple wasn't

i.e. there's not enough justification for a leadership shake-up. Twitter had more justification -- there were many CEO changes and the board wasn't happy with the leadership

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#196

Post by Blue111 »

mathgladiator wrote: post #153
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 isn't alone. A core problem is that FB culture is way too positive and happy, and hard criticism is received poorly. The politics to get anything done if your name isn't Mark is borderline impossible. I left a year ago, and I've become beyond happy.

> FB culture is way too positive and happy

oh wow.. never thought they could be happy at FB

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#198

Post by runevault »

lostgame wrote: post #186

Why Carmack was involved with Facebook/Meta when he joined was pretty confusing to me. Even if VR is pretty interesting technology to work on, where’s the joy in it if you’re effectively working for the Empire?

Keep in mind he joined Oculus BEFORE the purchase, he didn't chose Meta specifically, he just chose to stick around because he believed in the VR mission enough to try and make it work.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#199

Post by Blue111 »

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 actually thought facebook was doing a ok job with oculus until the whole 'metaverse' social push happend

the only good that they were doing was decent hardware at a decent price...

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