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John Carmack Leaves Meta

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Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#501

Post by fsiefken »

trevyn wrote: post #472
throwaway_8989 wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why was the Oculus Go considered a failure?

I think he meant commercially, technically (ideologically?) for me it was an amazing iphone/ipad like innovation - integrating samsung gear in one standalone easy to use package. I'd still use it for certain apps. https://www.reddit.com/r/OculusGo/comments/rnphlq/was_the_oc...

Oculus Go formed one of the starting points for 6DOF mobile VR (even though the Quest1 'Santa Cruz' was already in development). If the comment was truthful, here it shows some bias. There are always multiple sides to a story.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#502

Post by wzdd »

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…

It's just really weird to me that people are all shocked-Pikachu about Carmack wanting to be the auteur in this scenario and to wield Meta's effectively-infinite resources in the exact ways that he wanted. It's apparent from every interview and article about him that this is how he operates. It seems to have worked well for him in the past, but it was obviously going to be a major culture clash at Meta unless they gave in and let him run the thing.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#503

Post by AdrianB1 »

khazhoux wrote: post #428
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…

> It is simply stunning that the seasoned direction and counsel that someone of John Carmack’s caliber is capable of delivering was not being followed. This doesn't actually surprise me in the least bit, and that's not a criticism of either FB/Meta or Carmack. It's simply that after a couple of decades in industry, I now see that effective organizational leaders are exceedingly rare, and I've seen now many super-expe…

For every example of smart, thoughtful, effective senior leadership there are 10 or 100 of the opposite sort. Most corporations are a living proof of Peter's principle, where senior management is a country club of old* people covering each other's incompetence. * It is not about ageism, but about people that are in their 5 years before retirement and have zero motivation to do any work, keep skills in shape or give a damn. I worked with a lot of people that were more than decent in their careers, but dropped the ball completely in the last 5 to 10 years before retirement with huge negative impact for their employers. How can this happen? In big companies the inertia covers for these people.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#504

Post by detourdog »

SuperQue wrote: post #416
solardev wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that how Google ended up with eight chat apps while Search gets worse and worse every year?

Google ended up with a bunch of chat apps because the culture promotes building new over keeping things running. The first chat was basically an XMPP service. It was decent, it federated outside of Google, it was fully functional. It even supported group channels (XMPP conferences) internally. But I don't think that was ever exposed to the public. Then Hangouts was created. It was, per usual at Gooogle, a ground-up r…

The first sign of trouble to me was when google killed xmpp support. Prior to that everyone just logged into instant messaging on whatever device.

Every decision since then has been pro-ad network technical competition.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#505

Post by BlargMcLarg »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #485
throwaway_8989 wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah well, you're anonymous, so you might as well be someone with a huge ego who got their idea shut down by Carmack once and is still bitter about it. More often than not, when people think they "prove something wrong with data" it's more that they're "taking some data and interpret in a way that fits their standpoint". Carmack has proven enough times in the past that he's able to deliver, that he can push technolog…

>has proven enough times in the past

Past experiences do not mean future success. This isn't even about Carmack: past 'heroes' end up failing in their decision-making in the future many times, and they were followed for no other reason than 'they have a track record'.

The sooner that myth dies, the better.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#506

Post by peoplefromibiza »

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…

I've watched many Carmack videos over the years and he never complained about the team not following him or people working for him being not good enough, he always praised the work done and explained in very fine details why the decisions where taken one way or another.

When he wanted to remove a pebble from his shoe, he talked extensively of the company decisions, in the higher ups, which is more than fair given his role.

He never struck me as a "Steve Jobs of coding" (probably today Elon Musk?).

I also had several encounters with John Romero and talked a bit about the times at id Software and he never ever hinted that Carmack was problematic in any way.

He's also obviously not a very good politician/sellperson (he can't sell what he hasn't already produced or envisioned) and suffers bureaucracy, like every normal person here that is not a bureaucrat.

Anyway.

Regardless of the truthfulness of what you write, Carmack has always been able to deliver, both in time and as of code quality and maintainability, one way or another, Meta hasn't.

The evidence pile up more against FB/Meta management than against Carmack, moreover I think it's easy to attack the person taking responsibility in person than those hiding in the shadows, Linus suffered the same destiny, but he created Linux and brought it where it is now, the attackers didn't, so maybe Linus was simply right.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#507

Post by chimprich »

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…

> That's another sign to me that VR is once again not going anywhere

That's not Carmack's opinion. To quote from his post:

"Despite all the complaints I have about our software, millions of people are still getting value out of it. We have a good product. It is successful, and successful products make the world a better place."

"the fight is still winnable! VR can bring value to most of the people in the world"

The main problem with VR in my opinion is a lack of software. Most of the games produced have been either toys that are little more than a tech demo, or ports of other games not designed around VR. There haven't been many serious attempts to harness VR for non-game playing purposes.

I think the future is still bright for VR. We're currently in a bit of a local hype-cycle trough, but the tech is only going to improve.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#508

Post by threatripper »

BlargMcLarg wrote: post #505
iforgotpassword wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah well, you're anonymous, so you might as well be someone with a huge ego who got their idea shut down by Carmack once and is still bitter about it. More often than not, when people think they "prove something wrong with data" it's more that they're "taking some data and interpret in a way that fits their standpoint". Carmack has proven enough times in the past that he's able to deliver, that he can push technolog…

>has proven enough times in the past Past experiences do not mean future success. This isn't even about Carmack: past 'heroes' end up failing in their decision-making in the future many times, and they were followed for no other reason than 'they have a track record'. The sooner that myth dies, the better.

It does not ensure it but it is the best indicator we have.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#509

Post by rahoulb »

rlt wrote: post #383
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 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.

Yes and no.

If you talk about privacy they don’t care but they absolutely do when it comes to “I was talking to my friend about X and suddenly I’m seeing ads for it everywhere - my phone must be listening to me”. Their phone may not actually be listening to them but as soon as they see what it means, people hate how their data is used. They just never made the connection before.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#510

Post by boppo1 »

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…

Not sure I’d trust someone who mixes up ‘their’ and ‘there’ to interpret data proving or disproving some strategy. From the looks of the product, I’d say he was probably right on whatever that stuff was.
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