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John Carmack Leaves Meta

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Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#721

Post by jrmg »

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…

I’ve also seen morale being slowly killed by people who _thought_ they were doing this, but were _actually_ just argumentative defeatists.

I don’t think Carmack - or the engineer you describe - is likely to be one of these - but anyone hoping to emulate them should be conscious of what they’re doing.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#722

Post by mathgladiator »

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…

These dumb things emerge because of two forces: first, the promotion game of people trying to get theirs. Second, price's law.

Price's law is what constrains scope, and the boundary between engineers can often be the luck of having the right opportunity. As such, all the stupid things emerge trying to invent scope. I'm guilty of this, but that was the game.

There is no solution except accept that big companies kind of suck and are slow.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#723

Post by sieabahlpark »

SicSemperUranus wrote: post #657
monero-xmr wrote: post #649

I’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…

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

No post body was provided.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#724

Post by bob1029 »

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…

> Walk people towards the decision you want using a Socratic method and then let them take the credit for the decision making.

I've been trying really hard to do this. It is an impressive hack when you can pull it off.

If you have gigantic egos on your team, then getting everyone in agreement can often be expedited with a little bit of inception. My own ego is the biggest reason I have difficulty engaging in the socratic technique. And, as you note there are definitely cases where you kind of have to beat the sense into everyone else.

I am at a point where I kind of don't give a shit about the intermediate decisions and exact correctness anymore. I am far more interested in getting further down the product roadmap and seeing my entire vision unfold. Money has almost become a secondary concern to me. As long as the appropriate steps are taken, I don't even care if my name is on it anymore.

It is a lot easier to move an elephant when it performs of its own volition. The most advanced and effective forms of people management seem to involve manipulation of egos.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#725

Post by philwelch »

edmundsauto wrote: post #681
monero-xmr wrote: post #649

I’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…

The trade off is decision cycle time. In a dictatorship, the dictator (and getting their attention) becomes a bottleneck.

A democratic or consensus-based approach to making decisions can be even slower though, which is when it’s handy to have a dictator.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#727

Post by edmundsauto »

lolinder wrote: post #695
edmundsauto wrote: post #681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trade off is decision cycle time. In a dictatorship, the dictator (and getting their attention) becomes a bottleneck.

OP isn't saying that the person with ultimate authority has to be involved in every decision, just that when they do make a decision everyone respects it. You can have the kind of authority that OP is describing while still delegating most decisions to the individual contributors. You just need someone who is officially empowered to make the final call in cases where there's disagreement.

I disagree, they are fundamentally different cultures. You can have a blend of them I suppose. But you are either top down or bottoms up, and one of the top down trade offs is that people begin optimizing for what they think will pass approval by the decision maker.

This can obviously work, see apple under Jobs. But companies kind of have to pick a lane because the culture is either “drive to what I think is impactful” or “drive to what I think boss thinks is impactful”.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#728

Post by dang »

tomalaci wrote: post #647

For 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

Thanks - we merged the threads, and I included your URL in a pinned comment.

Normally I would have pinned your comment instead (sorry), but I needed to include the previously submitted URL and obviously I'm not going to edit your post to put that in.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#729

Post by edmundsauto »

philwelch wrote: post #725
edmundsauto wrote: post #681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trade off is decision cycle time. In a dictatorship, the dictator (and getting their attention) becomes a bottleneck.

A democratic or consensus-based approach to making decisions can be even slower though, which is when it’s handy to have a dictator.

Yes, especially with big groups. In smaller groups, decision making is usually faster and done by people with more local context in bottoms up organizations. See Team of Teams as a decent reference.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#730

Post by wnevets »

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.

> You don't get rewarded for preventing bad things.

This is the source of so many problems at large companies. The employees part of the day to the day understand how much of a positive impact this has but the people in charge of the cash don't see that.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease, or the new product launch gets the promotion.

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