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John Carmack Leaves Meta

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Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#351

Post by mhh__ »

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 very real "We used to do xyz at Facebook" issue sometimes.

Just because it worked for them (if that even) doesn't mean it's automatically a good idea.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#352

Post by dev_tty01 »

adamsb6 wrote: post #253
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.

I joined back in 2014 and left this year. I feel like I got to enjoy a couple of years before the company started to lose its nimbleness. Feedback groups used to get responses from the people that actually built the things instead of contractors whose primary function is feedback group triage. Sometimes you could actually have an impact by giving feedback, and you could see others having those impacts as well. When I…

>I think Portal is a perfect example of how slow to adapt the company has become. It's a fantastic video conferencing device, certainly the best at its price point. We happened to enter the pandemic with this device already available for sale, but we completely failed to capitalize on it.

Thanks for your insight, but the Portal failure shouldn't be surprising. There are a large number of people who would never want to have a private conversation or meeting using Facebook infrastructure or be forced to create a Facebook account to join a meeting. As far as Zoom support, again, why would anyone trust Facebook infrastructure with private meetings?

Aside from the trust issue, why buy hardware from FB just to have meetings?

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#353

Post by labrador »

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'm as shocked as you are. What a wasted opportunity by petty people with big egos. And I paid for it literally. I bought a Oculus set and stopped using soon after. What a disappointment. I wanted to support the technology, but my good will was squandered. At least I feel vindicated by every thing John Carmack says because I thought some similar things.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#354

Post by dagmx »

quartz wrote: post #311
dylan604 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nintendo seems to be the best at this. I pulled my Wii out of storage to play with my 4 year old earlier this month. Plugged it in and was off and running having a blast playing Wii Sports and Mario Kart.

The Wii is barely online. That’s a big part of it.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#355

Post by smrtinsert »

Mark and Meta have been given a once in a lifetime chance to right their way by refocusing and ironing out privacy and feature set while Twitter burns its house down. I wouldn't squander it on the metaverse.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#356

Post by djur »

bobkazamakis wrote: post #261
pengaru wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He was Bethesda and Oculus. He isn’t Meta. Meta is gargantuan compared to 2009-2013 Bethesda, which frankly seems like a golden handcuffs-era footnote in Carmack's professional history. He isn't even mentioned once in Bethesda's wikipedia page[0]... Oculus seemed far more apropos for a get-shit-done guy like Carmack. Personally I think FB acquiring him/Oculus was an almost certain shitty outcome for the VR technolo…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Software

It's confusing because the recent Doom games were developed by Id and published by Bethesda Softworks, and both of them are subsidiaries of Zenimax. Bethesda Softworks is just a publisher; the games Bethesda is best known for (The Elder Scrolls and Fallout 3+) are by Bethesda Game Studios.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#357

Post by m463 »

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u wrote: post #265
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…

Ironically I felt reassured reading this. "[...] I'm evidently not persuasive enough. A good fraction of the things I complain about eventually turn my way after [...] evidence piles up" especially resonates with me. While I rationally understand it's just corporate bureaucracy / politics, sometimes I still wonder if I were just a bit more capable I'd be more persuasive. If John fucking Carmack cannot move the bureau…

It's hard to walk this line.

I think some people are forthright and outspoken, but a long game persuasion might be the best strategy sometimes.

I remember Linus Torvalds commenting on systemd, and accepting the work with upstanding neutrality (I wished he had rejected the binary log files)

"I don't actually have any particularly strong opinions on systemd itself. I've had issues with some of the core developers that I think are much too cavalier about bugs and compatibility, and I think some of the design details are insane (I dislike the binary logs, for example), but those are details, not big issues."

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#358

Post by hinkley »

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…

That saying about how teenagers and twenty year old think they're immortal? There's some variant of that for programmers. That failure mode is something that happens to other people, to suckers, so I don't have to change direction because some guy who's going grey at the temples tells me I'm walking toward a cliff.

I've been in places where my job became a bit of a cleaner, for things that shouldn't have needed to be cleaned in the first place. When I realize that's what I'm doing - when it's most or all of what I'm doing - I leave. Sounds like John might have similar boundaries, and found himself standing at the edge of one.

I'd really like to see him try his own thing again, and either not sell it this time or be quite a bit more precious about what he's willing to part with and for how many zeroes.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#359

Post by xvector »

dev_tty01 wrote: post #352
adamsb6 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I joined back in 2014 and left this year. I feel like I got to enjoy a couple of years before the company started to lose its nimbleness. Feedback groups used to get responses from the people that actually built the things instead of contractors whose primary function is feedback group triage. Sometimes you could actually have an impact by giving feedback, and you could see others having those impacts as well. When I…

>I think Portal is a perfect example of how slow to adapt the company has become. It's a fantastic video conferencing device, certainly the best at its price point. We happened to enter the pandemic with this device already available for sale, but we completely failed to capitalize on it. Thanks for your insight, but the Portal failure shouldn't be surprising. There are a large number of people who would never want t…

It's difficult to describe how amazing Portal is. It was a game changer for those that used it

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#360

Post by doctor_eval »

xyzelement wrote: post #290
dcow wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a genuine question about what to do when one finds oneself in this type of position and one is surrounded by people who seemingly do give a damn (and one isn't compelled to just give up and leave). In my experience, the software industry, in it’s aggressive desire to be egalitarian, has an authority problem. I have encountered the “I told you so one year ago but we just had to learn the hard way didn't we” sit…

I want to write about this topic in more depth, but in a nutshell I found that the more innovative and valuable your idea is, the harder it is to sell (because it's very value comes from the fact that it's a distance from bow people are thinking today) People are busy and attention is scarce so knowing how to genuinely push and sell your idea in such environments is a rare ability and one that needs curation. You'll…

It doesn’t even have to be innovative in a global sense. Just making suggestions that are outside the experience of the people you need to convince can become futile.

Egotistical people with power are more than happy to ignore maths and rationality. I don’t know why. It never works out for them and it brings everyone else down. It’s very frustrating.

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