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John Carmack Leaves Meta

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Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#731

Post by lyu07282 »

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 feel like this post would have more credibility if the Quest and Horizons wasn't such a technical and privacy disaster.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#732

Post by eternalban »

_cs2017_ wrote: post #631
poszlem wrote: post #627

Quoted post unavailable.

Maybe I misunderstand what flat hierarchy means, but I don't think it is the same as "design by committee". It can still involve a single person making all important decisions; only that person isn't the one with the official title but rather whoever wins the most respect, has the most persuasive vision, etc.

"Can" is the key word here. What is the likely outcome: design by committee or merit worthy lead.

Also there is stability in organizational structure. This has obvious +/- points, with feature of e.g. 'Ives is leading the design' gives high probability that product line will remain consistent per a known standard, with the (equally high probability) bug of e.g. 'Ives is leading the design' gives high probability it will be more about the object than the user.

Both of the above are really manifestations of an increased degree of non-determinism in team operation. I think flat and/or dynamic order (per project) are still well worth considering, but imo this approach raises the bar on hiring. Before, you would need to trust the judgment of a few key employees, and now you must hope for the good judgment of nearly all of them.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#733

Post by steve76 »

gompertz wrote: post #620
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…

Quoted post unavailable.

No post body was provided.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#734

Post by jahlove »

kleinsch wrote: post #714
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 hier…

IC? RL?

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#735

Post by ryloric »

The way some users talk about him on this thread sounds almost cultish and creepy. I'm not American and don't play video games, but the way he's talked about you'd think he's Alan Turing or something.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#736

Post by dang »

poszlem wrote: post #627

Quoted post unavailable.

Please don't take HN threads into ideological flamewar. Regardless of which you're for or against, it's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34030063.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#737

Post by colinsane »

even the best of us vaguepost, huh?

i can hope that if you’re in the company you know exactly what he’s alluding to throughout this post, but here on the outside i’d bet more that this is the type of letter where everyone reading it interprets his words in different, and often opposing, ways.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#739

Post by bee_rider »

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…

Phrases like “benevolent dictator for life” have become pretty widespread, and they are cute, but I think the slightly obscure the issue or focus on the wrong thing.

A dictator can function with a small, powerful core of supporters (usually the military and then some key demographic or powerbrokers depending on the situation), and then keep the rest of the populace in their place through violence if necessary.

I think when we talk about somebody like Linus or Guido, they aren’t really dictators so much as consensus leaders. Everybody might not agree with their individual decisions, but there’s widespread agreement that somebody has to lead, and everyone can agree that there isn’t anyone who can do a better job.

And we should also note that Democracy isn’t some self-perpetuating system that can actually impose itself. Functionally, we don’t have a democracy because there’s 51% support for the leaders. We have a democracy because there’s broad consensus in the idea that, while we don’t always agree with the individual decisions of the democracy, we don’t have a better way of making decisions.

Honestly I don’t think it really matters so much how the decision making process works. Functional systems are ones in which the decision making process has broad consensus support. It could be tied to an idea, it could be tied to a person, it could even be tied to some abstract idea like following the rules of a religion. What matters is that people broadly think the system is good, follow it when nobody is checking, and are ok with following the spirit of the rules rather than getting hung up on process and technicalities. In open source, these tend to be personalized systems because somebody will just start a personal project and it will grow, but that’s very tied to the nature of programming and the fact that an individual can easily get a minimum viable product for many programming ideas.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#740

Post by zamalek »

comfypotato wrote: post #516
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…

At risk of upsetting this thread’s balance and reducing it to negativity: I prefer your parent comment’s interpretation of the Go. “Ahead of its time”? Technology is the last space where a newfangled product would lose momentum by being released to early. I’m open to being proved ignorant here. Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted? Subscription music services like…

> Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted?

Smartphones. Microsoft and Symbian were at least 7 years ahead of Apple. The manner in which they squandered the opportunity aside, most people simply didn't care about having email on their phone.

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