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John Carmack Leaves Meta

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Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#341

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]

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#342

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

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…

Dang, man. Where do you work that this ruthless self promotion (and denigration of all else) is not the norm? That’s been my experience throughout my 27 years, in 3 Fortune 250’s AND 2 mom-and-pop’s.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#343

Post by Salgat »

uplifter wrote: post #305
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…

>That's another sign to me that VR is once again not going anywhere Maybe it's just a sign of how hot AI is right now.

His goal is artificial general intelligence, something that seemed to grab his attention after he was already actively working on VR. My guess is that when he started teaching himself machine learning, he realized that he needed to focus all his attention on it if he was going to take it seriously. Facebook's failings just accelerated this for him.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#344

Post by dmix »

dmix wrote: post #189
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.

Is this a classic middle management malaise where everyone gets paid so well they don’t want to stir the pot? The bureaucracy and protection of today’s money cows which only clouds them from seeing tomorrow’s cows that will rescue them from certain obscurity? The Clayton M Christensen solution to big companies ignoring obvious problems is to have isolated small teams “infrapreneurship” who aren’t under the pressures…

Intrapreneurship*

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#346

Post by yellow_lead »

pengaru wrote: post #140

"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 de…

It's business insider so

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#347

Post by operatingthetan »

koudelka wrote: post #162
wpietri wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> self-promotion, office politics, and collecting wins for themselves A pal who was a manager at a FAANG said, "If you give people one game to play, they're going to play it very energetically." He was speaking of the promotion game, of course.

"You show loyalty, they learn loyalty. You show them it’s about the work, it’ll be about the work. You show them some other kind of game, and that’s the game they’ll play." -- The Wire

I often find it interesting how many people think the game is just whichever one they learned first, and don't grasp that the actual game is recognizing and learning how to play new ones.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#348

Post by mhh__ »

hajile wrote: post #29
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…

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.

I also think he's going to lose it massively (technical background aside, i.e. he's not an applied mathematician, it's a huge problem) BUT the AI industry is currently run with a very childish approach to software and programming, if his company can attack the infrastructure wisely they could really improve the industry. No idea how to make that money money though.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#349

Post by doktorhladnjak »

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’d describe it more as optimism than happiness. You gotta believe in the future vision, how great a place this is, etc.

The hope is that it creates a can-do culture. Downside is that it can create a culture where no one feels safe criticizing bad ideas.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#350

Post by Mockapapella »

ryandrake wrote: post #322
Buttons840 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. I feel like this a lot. I don't know if it's a bias of some kind but it feels right. I suppose it's selection bias. I don't know how to market, but apparently the marketing people do because we have customers. I do know about my corner of the system though, and when my advice is ignored it usually turns out I was right in the end.

At MegaCompanies, being right, having evidence, and trying to persuade just isn’t enough, as John Fucking Carmack figured out. It’s more like High School. You need to be in the right clique or have the ear of the right Very Important Person. When you send that E-mail and say “We should do X because Y and Z…” people stop reading at “because” and just go look in the company directory for your name. If you’re high enoug…

“High school never ends” hits differently when it’s a little closer to home
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