Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

John Carmack Leaves Meta

facebook.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

711–720 of 1001 posts

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#711

Post by civopsec »

baby wrote: post #626

I see a lot of negative comment on the other thread and on twitter so I feel the need to comment as well. It’d be great to get the perspective from someone who worked there, but I can offer mine as an outsider (worked on a different team at fb). Back then, I would religiously read every workplace posts from Carmack (that wasn’t hidden to other orgs). I loved everything he was saying, I always found it really insightf…

I don’t understand what the problem would be for him if this was the environment. He’s respected as a technologist and had strong opinions on technology. He’s not merely a tech. savant without social skills.

Again, this assumes that this was what the environment was like. Not that it was just like that in name only.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#712

Post by Nimitz14 »

krisoft wrote: post #659

I think Carmack is a great engineer. Part of that is being great at communication. And he is! Usually. But this paragraph is quite hard to follow: > If I am trying to sway others, I would say that an org that has only known inefficiency is ill prepared for the inevitable competition and/or belt tightening, but really, it is the more personal pain of seeing a 5% GPU utilization number in production. I am offended by i…

Changing the source instead of adding an edit would make previous comments that were asking about the unclear part not make sense anymore.

The 5% figure is kinda shocking, that’s why he put a number. And it’s I think why people appreciate him, because he gets specific instead if writing a vague statement like “pain of seeing an application waste resources”.

I really don’t understand how it can be unclear that 5% is bad.

The thing that was actually unclear was people not understanding it was analogy for organizational effectiveness.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#713

Post by [deleted] »

baby wrote: post #626

I see a lot of negative comment on the other thread and on twitter so I feel the need to comment as well. It’d be great to get the perspective from someone who worked there, but I can offer mine as an outsider (worked on a different team at fb). Back then, I would religiously read every workplace posts from Carmack (that wasn’t hidden to other orgs). I loved everything he was saying, I always found it really insightf…

[deleted]

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#714

Post by kleinsch »

baby wrote: post #626

I see a lot of negative comment on the other thread and on twitter so I feel the need to comment as well. It’d be great to get the perspective from someone who worked there, but I can offer mine as an outsider (worked on a different team at fb). Back then, I would religiously read every workplace posts from Carmack (that wasn’t hidden to other orgs). I loved everything he was saying, I always found it really insightf…

I worked at Meta. Yea, there was a promoted culture of flatness, but that only applied to the IC side. Within engineering there are separate levels but everyone has the same title "Software engineer" so that (supposedly) level shouldn't be a factor in whose argument is correct. In practice, everyone knows who's high-vs-low level, so it's mostly a charade.

On the management side, there are clear titles, reporting hierarchies, and areas of ownership. They decide what gets prioritized, staffed, and shipped. As an IC, you can make technical decisions and recommend product ideas, but you'll never ship functionality to users without PM, design, and eng leadership approval.

Within RL, like everywhere else at Meta, there are VPs and Directors whose job was to set strategy and create roadmaps. RL had a multi-year roadmap aggregating roadmaps from all the sub-orgs within RL. There's no world where a single IC, even at Carmack's level, is going to subvert that hierarchy. The job of a senior IC is to influence and check their management counterparts to make sure they're prioritizing the right things. Clearly he wasn't able to do that to the extent he wanted.

When I was there a couple years ago, I looked into joining RL a couple times but got advice from coworkers that the rotating carousel of leadership led to changing roadmaps/priorities, so it was a thrashy place to be.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#716

Post by albinofrenchy »

naillo wrote: post #697
baby wrote: post #626

I see a lot of negative comment on the other thread and on twitter so I feel the need to comment as well. It’d be great to get the perspective from someone who worked there, but I can offer mine as an outsider (worked on a different team at fb). Back then, I would religiously read every workplace posts from Carmack (that wasn’t hidden to other orgs). I loved everything he was saying, I always found it really insightf…

I feel like Metas 'flatness' is revealing itself as suboptimal now that its stock is tanking. While the product is generating money and productivity doesn't really matter, the organization can afford to have masses of engineers doing not much of anything. But when things are going bad and clear top down organization is needed, then this culture suddenly turns into massive friction and might end up killing the company…

I don't claim to understand corporate structures or the best way to organize a large group of employees but metas problems seem to stem more from betting on the wrong thing which seemed like a decision that came from the top.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#717

Post by zackees »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #685
SicSemperUranus wrote: post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finding good devs is hard enough without a dictatorial style of leadership. I find that people like democracy, for some reason.

Good leadership feels like a democracy while actually being a dictatorship. Walk people towards the decision you want using a Socratic method and then let them take the credit for the decision making. Of course sometimes you will get a situation where someone doesn’t arrive at the solution you want anyway so you need to excise a bit of hard power, but hopefully that is rare enough that people respect it when you do i…

No post body was provided.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#718

Post by grogenaut »

praptak wrote: post #676
drewg123 wrote: post #634

"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.

I got top marks in 2021 based on feedback from two high level managers because I "prevented a year of wasted engineer with with a comment on a Google doc". Those marks lead to a nice pay bump.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#719

Post by afterburner »

chongli wrote: post #487
kubb wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wis…

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. This is part of the reason I like Steve Jobs so much. The stories around him never failed to mention his legendary penchant for downright nasty behaviour. And yet people loved him anyway, even when they lived…

The people with those stories typically made a lot of money thanks to Jobs. The people who didn't, just have a negative opinion of him.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#720

Post by timeon »

praptak wrote: post #676
drewg123 wrote: post #634

"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.

Like with politics. Everyone notices leader visiting places after disaster while no-one can notice if one was prevented.
Post reply on HN