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John Carmack Leaves Meta

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Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#461

Post by nonrandomstring »

urthor wrote: post #395
m463 wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

With those big companies, commonly there simply isn't a productive way to walk the line. 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.

> commonly there simply isn't a productive way to walk the line

I think that sums up the problem of institutional dynamics and individual talent rather well. For people with strong work ethics, sense of duty and genuine creative optimism, it's very painful to sit in a room of avoidant, grinning suits being superficially nice to one another wasting time trying to find "clever" reasons not to do anything. The whole show is a cloying deadlock. It's squandering human intelligence and life opportunities. I can't be witness to that tragedy and no remuneration, however many zeros you add, can make it worthwhile.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#462

Post by _the_inflator »

wpietri wrote: post #72
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…

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…

Try it yourself. Strap something 8 hours or longer around your head, don't move, because every small tremor distorts the vision of the device.

VR in its current form is eye cocaine, nothing more. Why watch poppy avatars hop around in a virtual reality, while you are bound to do nothing?

In every way, VR should be restricted to very few use cases, not to - hello Zuck - rebuild reality completely and hereby track everything you do or see to deliver even more addictive material to your eye vision.

It sounds cool, some use cases look cool, but the very fact that hardly anyone at Meta uses their own device/creature, speaks volumes. I am glad, JC takes consequences and abandons this experiment.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#463

Post by zppln »

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…

If Carmack suggested changes to my code I'd implement them in a heartbeat. If he suggested changes to my business I'd be a bit more cautious.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#464

Post by jimmySixDOF »

throwaway_8989 wrote: post #452
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…

Throwaway because it could be easy to identify my position from my normal account name. Carmack is many thing, engineering genius above them. However, he would frequently wade into areas where he had no experience, demand others do what he said, ignore evidence he was wrong, bully people, and disparage entire teams who were doing good, and in some cases legally required, work. When data proved his idea was wrong, he…

He was alone on his side of the table for the All In One integrated hardware approach that was the Go and became the Quest and, after years, proved to be the right long term direction. Of course that is out of his mouth according to him but, if true, it is the kind of high level strategy setting that separates market leaders from the also ran's. Very different from task level involvement but friction there should be separate from effectiveness at the CTO's desk level (& I have to guess Boz is the one who's quality of life got improved more than specific engineering teams)

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#465

Post by vintermann »

earthnail wrote: post #458
eyko wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Big corps usually prohibit their employees from expressing their personal opinions. It’s sometimes tolerated but always against the employment contract. So whenever you’re saying something, bigcorp could decide that “this one’s too far”. On a topic with as much PR as this one, it’s rather dangerous to comment on if you gave a medium-to-high level position. The reason big corps do it is so that their PR department has…

> Big corps usually prohibit their employees from expressing their personal opinions.

Yes, but does that make it any better though? We understand why they have to do it anonymously, but it's still someone with nothing at stake, who we can't evaluate the claims of.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#466

Post by kubb »

throwaway_8989 wrote: post #452
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…

Throwaway because it could be easy to identify my position from my normal account name. Carmack is many thing, engineering genius above them. However, he would frequently wade into areas where he had no experience, demand others do what he said, ignore evidence he was wrong, bully people, and disparage entire teams who were doing good, and in some cases legally required, work. When data proved his idea was wrong, he…

HN is all about that cult of personality, we want to believe in heroic programmers (or founders) who singlehandedly change the world with their geinus clarity.

Paul Graham said this, John Carmack said that and we lap it all up.

It's been this way since the ancient times, and the stories of Hercules and Theseus. We mythologize these personalities, and in our mind they become demigods.

But there's a reason the folk wisdom tells you to never meet your heroes. When you do, you painfully realize that the stories didn't focus on their humanity but instead were spinning the myths of their divinity.

The person in your head is a source of inspiration. The person in the world, on which the former is based, is a source of disappointment.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#467

Post by rightbyte »

ojbyrne wrote: post #391
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…

One of the things that bothered me there was working with contractors. I felt like having two tiers really undermined a lot of the culture.

Ye you get an apartheid atmosphere when the amount of contractors go so high that they can't be experts anymore.

Oh so now there is a Xmas lunch, but a third of the group is not invited. Or "No ice cream" for you.

It is funny how it was the small things that pissed me off. Who in their right mind even has a Xmas lunch without everyone ...

It was always one manager layer disconnected from the actual contractors that pulled off the BS meany things. The direct management knew that had to give ice cream to contractors too.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#468

Post by bratbag »

meta_throwaway_ wrote: post #421
dev_tty01 wrote: post #352

Earlier 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 I wouldn't be surprised if Meta was the number one way people have private conversations on planet earth.

Chatting about grannies birthday? Sure.

Talking about company ip? Not a chance in hell.

When making a purchasing decision for company comms tools, guess which of those two have to be considered.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#469

Post by [deleted] »

nobodyandproud wrote: post #193
yawnxyz wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#470

Post by loppg »

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's the norm these days I think. No one is supposed to be an expert, everyone is equal, everyone's voice matters.

If you are an expert and demand high code quality, you are a class traitor and the bureaucrats will come after you.

This shows in the code quality of the OSS examples I have seen from Facebook.

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