People are saying “if John freaking Carmack can’t handle the politics, it must be bad.” And it probably is. But based on what little I know about Mr Carmack, I suspect his personality and incentives are unusually unsuited to navigating the politics of a massive bureaucracy.
John Carmack Leaves Meta
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Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#702For those who don't want to view Facebook post (or can't login to it). I created pastebin of his resignation post: https://pastebin.com/Jk5TrGch Also, the other discussion (700+ comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34022484
Switching to reader mode also works.
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#703I’m a strong believer in dictatorship at companies. Every team has someone with ultimate decision making power, as does every project with a project leader, and above teams are leaders who have authority above them, and so on. Of course there are meetings and discussions but there is always someone with the authority to make a decision that everyone has to respect. Honestly it benefits everyone. ICs like that authori…
Agreed. Hierarchy is important. Someone asked me to do something? Directly above me in the hierarchy - done. Someone at my level or under me? Add it to the backlog along with 100s of other things.
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#704Earlier quoted context omitted.
The part about not giving a fuck is crucial. You don't get rewarded for preventing bad things.
You can, but only in the long run, and only if you’re saying “yes” to good things too. We’ve all probably worked with someone who just says no to everything and manages to kill both good ideas and bad. That leads to stagnation, which can be even worse than trying and failing at a bunch of different ideas.
What's tricky is managing "the good idea BUT" situations.
Good ideas at the wrong time, or good ideas if only we had the heads, skill, money.
Say Yes to those and you can screw things up, say No and you might not be forgiven.
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#705> [edit: I was being overly poetic here, as several people have missed the intention. As a systems optimization person, I care deeply about efficiency. When you work hard at optimization for most of your life, seeing something that is grossly inefficient hurts your soul. I was likening observing our organization's performance to seeing a tragically low number on a profiling tool.] as someone who spends a lot of time…
I'm interested in learning more about how to optimize JavaScript programs. Do you know of any good examples or other resources in this area?
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#706Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#707When a company like Facebook becomes successful it attracts a bunch of "execs" whose only job is to bleed the company dry. It's hard for people to do good work. That is why good engineers shouldn't join faang but do their own thing or join a startup which hasn't yet attracted the leeches.
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#708"I have never been able to kill stupid things before they cause damage" One of the most important things an organization can have is a "no man". A project that I was involved in when I worked at Google was completed on time primarily because we had a very senior (DE level) engineer tangentially involved in the project. He was near the end of his career, and he just didn't give a f* about politics. He'd sit in design…
The part about not giving a fuck is crucial. You don't get rewarded for preventing bad things.
It really depends on the size of the org and the team dynamics.
In a small startup with a fairly high degree of trust and emotional safety your CEO is more likely to notice that you prevented damage/loss by saying no.
A large org where so much is lost due to the telefone game, misaligned goals, hierarchy and increased complexity is not an environment where this is (usually) noticed or appreciated.
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#709> [edit: I was being overly poetic here, as several people have missed the intention. As a systems optimization person, I care deeply about efficiency. When you work hard at optimization for most of your life, seeing something that is grossly inefficient hurts your soul. I was likening observing our organization's performance to seeing a tragically low number on a profiling tool.] as someone who spends a lot of time…
I think the 5% was a metaphor for how the org is barely able to utilize its resources. Also wouldn't React JS/TS be an instance where you are fully utilizing resources? Not from a raw machine performance standpoint, but from a developer efficiency standpoint. Using nested for loops instead of a series of JS array functions is way more efficient but it is not even close to worth it. Machines are so powerful these days…
Sure if you work on something where performance doesn't matter
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#710Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You’re supposed to lead without authority John seems to be particularly calling out that he was not able to influence the people with high enough rank to make decisions. So it sounds like he at least thought there was an authority structure there wasn't as flat as you describe.
Valve is a great example of how this doesn't work in practice. Jeri Ellsworth got fired and revealed that the supposedly flat hierarchy at Valve is really composed of informal cliques - with the most influential groups having a direct line to the CEO/ Kinda what happened to communism in Russia, if you think about it
As humans we do have built-in hardware for forming informal cliques, so this could be seen as leveraging our built-in strengths (although you have to consciously work against some of the built-in cognitive biases that people have so it might be a risky thing, maybe not worth it).