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…
John Carmack Leaves Meta
391–400 of 1001 posts
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#392Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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…
> 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. A large number of people in your circle / on HN / etc perhaps, but I think the vast majority of the general population have no such concern.
Facebook is not very popular among IT people in corporate world.
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that how Google ended up with eight chat apps while Search gets worse and worse every year?
I’m willing to bet that that’s also how Google will be completely disrupted by an AI-first competitor. The execs will be too chicken to kill their current golden goose.
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does this solution work? Does every team work this way? Is there no HR but only local administration? Or is it only a few teams who get this privilege? How do you avoid us vs. Them mentality in that situation?
Well most of the company still needs to keep the cash cow running. So it’s only 10% of the company at most typically. You just have to have your future bets simultaneously be taken serious and isolated from the middle management and cyclical swings of the parent company. Often companies get excited about a new idea, staff and finance them well… then after a year or two they get thrown into the wider system and expect…
Spin "the other bets" out as a separate company.
Capitalize it separately.
Literally just don't have it as part of the parent company.
The only advantage of having the company inside the "parent" increasingly becomes accounting tricks.
Concealing excess profits via shuffling them to the "other bet" is the biggest trick of them all.
All publicly listed companies actively hide profits from shareholders.
Who might want the capital as a dividend.
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Saving face and preserving "decision making credibility" means that taking advice is simply not on the cards for a large portion of the middle management class.
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#396"When you work hard at optimization for most of your life, seeing something that is grossly inefficient hurts your soul." - John Carmack
https://www.facebook.com/100006735798590/posts/pfbid0iPixEvP...
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
> FB culture is way too positive and happy oh wow.. never thought they could be happy at FB
Never worked there, but from everything I have observed, the free lunches, full medical/dental/vision and high six figure salaries generally imbue people with a sense of well being. The nice offices and decent working hours also help. The trip is that Facebook also has some mission driven stuff about making the world a bit nicer that some people really buy into. It's a good mission too and a lot of people really do e…
Hedonic adaptation is real. You compare yourself to your peer group, in which there’s always people living larger than you, stocks appreciated more than yours, bought their house earlier than you, higher earning spouse than yours (or any spouse at all if you’re single), generational wealth from China, etc. And homeownership in the Bay Area is such an insatiable black hole that this kind of money merely puts you in the running. You’ll never be, like, unable to repair a household appliance - which is better than many people! - but neither are you just waltzing through life milestones in the way people think when they see these figures. You’re mostly a pass-through vehicle from your company to local property owners.
Some companies are more top down and some companies are more entrepreneurial. Amazon is famous for assigning just the right amount of work to break you before your stock vests. Apple has rigid and precise opinions about what it wants built, with engineers discouraged from scratching their own itches. Facebook on the other hand is all about initiative, with engineers being almost like Wall Street traders: come up with ideas and implement them on your own, and in your performance review we’ll check the numbers to see whether you made us money or not. Like trading, you might have a good hypothesis that just didn’t pan out, or something else outside your control might have shifted, but that’s not going to save you. You have to be right. It’s stressful! But one thing that happens in places run this way is a pretty strong social norm against trying to stop anything before it happens. If someone wants to run an AB test, however stupid it seems, they get to run it, and you have to trust in the data (and data analysis) to reveal whether it was really a good idea or not.
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#398Earlier 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…
Have you ever heard of Whatsapp? More than a billion people use it for private communication daily. Maybe not in the US, but elsewhere on the planet. You know who owns Whatsapp? Meta does.
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#399”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…
The signs were all there. He entered a den where he doesn't hold founder status anymore, and that the value of his contributions to the company does not hold as much weight.
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lex's guest list is absurd. I'm honestly not sure how he's managed to pull it off.
network effects mostly. how Joe Rogan did it? not by being a genius. (by being mostly entertaining and a bit informative, and Lex built on this by being mostly informative and almost completely anti-entertaining)
I don’t agreee with this. I love Lex Fridman podcasts and watched almost all episodes, and most of the times I watch it for entertainment. There is some surface level information in few episodes, but that doesn’t seem to be the norm.