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John Carmack Leaves Meta

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Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#751

Post by bick_nyers »

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…

How does one effectively filter for these types of companies while doing a job search?

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#752

Post by b3morales »

adamsb6 wrote: post #741
dev_tty01 wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think Portal is a perfect example of how slow to adapt the company has become. It's a fantastic video conferencing device, certainly the best at its price point. We happened to enter the pandemic with this device already available for sale, but we completely failed to capitalize on it. Thanks for your insight, but the Portal failure shouldn't be surprising. There are a large number of people who would never want t…

As a recent insider, this is one of those things where the outside perception doesn't match the inside at all. Privacy is taken more seriously at Facebook than any other place I've ever worked. It's drilled into you from day one that we have systems in place to catch you accessing things you shouldn't and you will be immediately fired if you do. You can make mistakes that bring the entire site down and cost the compa…

I appreciate you making the point, but it sounds like the perception is correct, but the definitions don't match. Individual-human-level privacy controls are important, and it's good that they're in place, but equally important is the systemic use of all that hoovered data.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#753

Post by davewritescode »

jrmg wrote: post #721
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.

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

Yes, I've also seen this as well. At some point you need people who will go off on a limb and do something crazy. I've seen in multiple times in my career. In particular I remember an architect who'd ruthlessly attempt to take scope out of projects but while we was in charge, we were nearly never innovating. Just delivering features on time and budget. Existing customers were always delighted but we had a hard time reaching new markets.

After he left, there's been a fair bit of projects that "didn't work" but there's been a couple of absolute home runs that would've never gotten off the ground because they were pretty wild.

There's I've heard a few times that resonates with me and I reiterate to all senior engineers I work with when they get into conflicts. "It takes all kinds of people to make a great company" You need dreamers, the people who worry about the money, cold and calculating execute at all costs types and folks and the folks who are happy to toil in a small but critical corner of a massive system to keep the lights on.

In my experience you can get into trouble when you try to play multiple roles at the same time because it's mentally exhausting trying to to do things like sell a vision while being the person trying to keep the economics of the thing from completely falling apart.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#754

Post by [deleted] »

HideousKojima wrote: post #645
jleyank wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was the left wing driving Facebook it would not collect so much data. They’re the ones who wrote about big brother, not the other guys.

Yes Orwell was a leftist, but he also wrote Animal Farm, a criticism of leftists for becoming hypocrites after gaining power.

[deleted]

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#755

Post by leeoniya »

euiq wrote: post #705
leeoniya wrote: post #625

> [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?

nothing specific, just do a google search.

generally i think advice that will always be applicable:

- learn and use a profiler before there are performance issues, not after (dont treat performance as an afterthought).

- internalize which patterns are faster and which are slower, and when it matters.

- for any runtime with a GC, reduce repetitive memory allocation and GC pressure. prefer shallow structures. mutation instead of immutability (thus, mem allocation).

- cache/memoize whenever possible.

- don't use algorithms that scale poorly with data size.

finally, beware of following any performance advice older than 6 months; JITs advance constantly, so make sure to re-bench/measure continuously to avoid doing unnecessary refactors, and test with real code; there are lies, damned lies, and micro-benchmarks.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#756

Post by monero-xmr »

bick_nyers wrote: post #751
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…

How does one effectively filter for these types of companies while doing a job search?

Not sure as it is more of a culture thing. When interviewing you can ask how decisions are made. “Mission focused” is the term I use but I’m sure it means different things to different companies.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#757

Post by poszlem »

dang wrote: post #736
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 .

Thank you for explaining, I will take this into account for sure.

Could you let me know if my comment would be allowed to stay on the site if I only posted its first part? (and omitted the "left-wing" remark)

Not trying to argue with your decision, just want to change how I write future posts.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#758

Post by Prolixium »

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.

A few years ago I saw a promotion announcement e-mail come into my inbox for a colleague who sat a few steps from my desk. It was filled with the usual "did this, did that, made an impact, etc." statements but it also had a large section dedicated to the analysis this employee performed and presented to kill a huge initiative before the organization rolled it out. The initiative was very innovative but it ultimately wouldn't have achieved its goals. It was encouraging to see this in a promotion announcement and indicated to me that some organizations do explicitly reward for preventing bad things.

This was at AWS.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#759

Post by orangecat »

adamsb6 wrote: post #741
dev_tty01 wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think Portal is a perfect example of how slow to adapt the company has become. It's a fantastic video conferencing device, certainly the best at its price point. We happened to enter the pandemic with this device already available for sale, but we completely failed to capitalize on it. Thanks for your insight, but the Portal failure shouldn't be surprising. There are a large number of people who would never want t…

As a recent insider, this is one of those things where the outside perception doesn't match the inside at all. Privacy is taken more seriously at Facebook than any other place I've ever worked. It's drilled into you from day one that we have systems in place to catch you accessing things you shouldn't and you will be immediately fired if you do. You can make mistakes that bring the entire site down and cost the compa…

Sure, but I expect most people's primary threat model isn't that a rogue Facebook employee will access their data and use it to stalk them. It's that Facebook will sell their data to advertisers who will use it to better manipulate them, or to insurance companies who will raise their rates.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#760

Post by dumbotron »

This isn't going to make me friends. John Carmack hasn't be relevant for years, and this doesn't move me one way or another. There was a time when game engines were simpler and the work of incredible engineers who could make something happen five years sooner, but we're past that, and I'm not sure Carmack is.

> it is the more personal pain of seeing a 5% GPU utilization number in production. I am offended by it.

For a high-level badge post, I'm not sure why he's calling out a low-level metric like this. It's also a complicated metric. Keeping GPU utilization low improves battery life. Delivering jaw-dropping graphics might have been the goal in 1993, but we're past that, and for all its flaws, I doubt Wii-level graphics are the reason no one uses Horizon Worlds.

Which brings me to why he left now. The company doesn't want Quest to be just a gaming headset any more, but Carmack does. It's a fair disagreement to have, and investors are even with Carmack on this, but a mature leader would disagree and commit or quietly step aside. Carmack isn't a mature leader, he's a talented, high-level IC you hire as a mascot.

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