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John Carmack Leaves Meta

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Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#231

Post by schrodinger »

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…

I work for a European unicorn and that's definitely not the case. We explicitly reward quality, testing, automation, etc—partially it's on your manager to explain the value of non-product work. We are literally having a pause on feature work right now to focus 100% on QA, automation and testing!

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#232

Post by philwelch »

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 makes a certain kind of sense. Many FAANG companies are in such a dominating business position due to network effects and the like that they capture a massive economic surplus, and when organization capture huge economic surpluses, the employees are less incentivized to help the company succeed (since that’s going to happen anyway) and more incentivized to extract what they can personally.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#233

Post by philistine »

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…

Slimming down Twitter's workforce is indeed a valid choice. But perhaps Elon should have spent six weeks meeting every team and asking what they did before acting, like Steve Jobs did at Apple.

As it stands, it didn't seem like it helped focus the company in any way shape or form.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#234

Post by nonethewiser »

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"

Respect your elders

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#235

Post by harrisonjackson »

Blue111 wrote: post #196
mathgladiator wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I interpreted this as coerced positivity and forced happiness. Not organic actual emotion from feeling fulfilled and successful within their role.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#236

Post by throwawaycrpclt »

kentm wrote: post #63
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 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…

The extra bad part about this is it's propagating into the industry as a whole. Much better to be ruthlessly egoistic and clear tickets. Demo or go bust. Collaboration? Ah well of course as lip service at best, for sure always restrained for basic survival. No wonder people are less happy than they used to be. And less creative in outcome. This is not how humans usually work in groups. Trust and camaraderie is prime. I hope at one point we will look back and say "Wow that was some silly culture we had going back then".

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#238

Post by methodical »

worldsayshi wrote: post #120
hajile wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect he's going to get smacked hard by the AGI problem and ultimately concede defeat on his biggest goal while achieving some success in the current less-than-general ML stuff.

If you solve a few more problems with chatgpt it's going to become useful enough that people are going to stop caring so much about the AGI label. It's going to quack like a duck enough to change a lot of industries.

> "If you solve a few more problems"

The amount of work done by these 7 words is incredible. ChatGPT is far from changing a "lot" of industries. Still pathetic at programming (which isn't its purpose, but is AlphaCode's purpose; which also sucks), use of it for copy writing is nullified since it seems Google will crack down on AI generated copy writing. DALL-E is also a nice party trick but far from being particularly useful.

I'd certainly love to have a useful AI but I think we're experiencing a 80-20 rule situation right now, and that it'll be a few years before we see anything that makes significant improvements on current solutions.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#239

Post by solardev »

dylan604 wrote: post #155
srajabi wrote: post #7

Basically Carmack is frustrated by: 1. Rate of progress on AR/VR at meta 2. People within Meta not "Giving a Dam!" / Poor decisions made within the org 3. Poor quality of the execution which I guess is related to #2 Relevant quote: "It pains me to hear people say that they don't even get their headset out to show off at the company because they know it's going to be a mess of charging and updating before they can mak…

This was my gripe about all console games. Real gamers that are daily users have their systems kept up to date, but I'm not one of those. I'm one of those that plays a few times a month, and only when I have nothing else to do. Because of the infrequent use of the console, I'm guaranteed to have to do an update on every use. The update alone cuts into the time allotted for gaming. So I play even less and less to the…

Why don't you just turn on auto updates?

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#240

Post by xwowsersx »

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…

Where is that quotation from? I don't see that in the linked article.
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