John Carmack Leaves Meta

A lot of millennials value freedom of choice and open collaboration ad nauseam, but this is the danger of too many voices—nothing gets done. No singular purpose. No authority—or rather, no respect for authority. The reality is: we are not all equal. Some people are just better at what they do than others. Perhaps we should listen to what they say?

But that’s how politics goes—some schmucks who have no idea nor vision, nor experience, nor know-how, rise up on the backs of engineers who do all the work. Typically out of insecurity or over-ambition they trample on-up.

And who would want to deal with the cutthroat bullshit of trying to deal with these people?

Go Carmack—create something amazing with your startup. Meta will rot away in the next ten years because someone else will invent a better VR headset. Just like Linus helped invent a better OS—free to use, open to collaborate, with vision and focus. With attention-to-detail and quality-engineering as a first-class citizen.

Kinda what happened to communism in Russia, if you think about it

A few years ago I took a new role in my org, a team in a big tech company, where I was expected to influence the technical direction the key infrastructure that supports our mission. I had no direct authority to tell anyone what to do, except the small team that reported to me. But I had the endorsement of the bosses and a reputation as a respected technical voice from years as a senior IC before moving to management. No problem, I thought. We're small, and I know everyone and they know me. Those things had always been enough.

During that time, though, the team headcount grew fourfold, we had been less than a hundred people and now we're three hundred or more. We stopped calling ourselves a "team" and started to say "org" or "department". It was impossible to have personal relationships with everyone, and the ways I used to influence change stopped working. I became ineffective. I could influence individuals, but without defined processes and management systems that cemented my authority I couldn't influence the org efficiently anymore. I could see things going in bad directions, and I could get meetings with leaders and give them my opinion and recommendations. The would listen and nod in agreement, but the ship wouldn't turn.

The result for me was many months of near-burnout, the feeling of shouting into the void. What saved me was leaning on project and product management, and stepping back into a role of setting and influencing requirements and priorities, where I still have a voice people listen to. I use my one-on-one relationships to preview my vision for our direction and get feedback and buy-in from the other leaders, but the PMs manage the team-wide communication and execution. After almost a year of this, I think we're starting to be back in a good place where we have a roadmap and know what we're doing, but I also know we'll never be as nimble as we were when we were 50-75 people.

People like the illusion of democracy and the stability of dictatorship. As we can see from this and the other thread, when the proverbial shit rolls horizontally instead of vertically effectiveness goes down and leadership becomes impotent. The game becomes 'who can I blame this on adjacent to me?' instead of either up or down.

The best way to make everyone happy is to have the democratic discussion, hear everyone out, and then let the boss acknowledge their help and make their decision. Loyalty to the boss, regardless of their decision then determines performance. Team members did their duty by offering their best insight, whether it was selected or not.