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John Carmack Leaves Meta

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Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#771

Post by rohit89 »

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…

If you are really good at something, people will like you inspite of your drawbacks however big they may be.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#772

Post by jasonhansel »

Honestly, I suspect that many people at Meta know that the whole VR/metaverse thing isn't going to pan out, leading people in that department to (say) spend time engaging in office politics rather than working on developing the product.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#773

Post by 8note »

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.

If you're typing quickly, you can miss when autocorrect puts in the wrong replacement

I stopped caring about when people have incorrect your vs you're and there vs their because it's really about whether the autocorrect ai is getting them right. English is an evolving language that I don't think will keep those distinctions in the future

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#774

Post by theptip »

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?

Ask your hiring manager questions about decision making. Some I like:

“How do product/feature decisions get made? Walk me through the lifecycle of a new feature from customer/stakeholder to release and evaluation”

“What’s the org approach to tech debt? How do various proposed fixes get prioritized and worked on?” (In a top-down org even tech debt will be centrally groomed. In a fully distributed org the answer is something like “what? Folks just fix stuff that needs to be fixed.”)

“How do you align your teams to the company’s / org’s objectives?”

Basically you need to treat interviews as two-way. You are interviewing the company too, and you can always ask for another Hiring Manager chat at the end of the process if you still have Qs you didn’t get to.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#775

Post by lazilyloaded »

dpkirchner wrote: post #559
dcow wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a genuine question about what to do when one finds oneself in this type of position and one is surrounded by people who seemingly do give a damn (and one isn't compelled to just give up and leave). In my experience, the software industry, in it’s aggressive desire to be egalitarian, has an authority problem. I have encountered the “I told you so one year ago but we just had to learn the hard way didn't we” sit…

> Certainly Carmack has the industry respect to be taken seriously. Why wasn’t he? I wonder if his schedule played some part. He worked there for one day a week. I could see it being really difficult to understand his vision if you have to wait 7 days to ask a follow-up*, for example. And it's gotta be close to impossible to move the needle on existing culture if you're barely around. * and while you wait there are p…

He only moved into the part-time role in the past few years. Before then he was the legit CTO of the company.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#776

Post by theptip »

wpietri wrote: post #72
modeless wrote: post #4

He just founded a new company called Keen Technologies to work on AGI. Not surprising that he wants to focus on that now. He's been part-time at Meta for years. I'm interested to find out what kind of business model he's planning for an AGI company. Edit: he posted his leaving message publicly here: https://www.facebook.com/100006735798590/posts/pfbid0iPixEvP... Additional public comments on Twitter here: https://twi…

It's very interesting to me that he's giving up on VR entirely. If he thought it was just an issue with Facebook, presumably he'd jump in somewhere else and get the impact he was looking to have. That's another sign to me that VR is once again not going anywhere. Or rather, half of it isn't. Oculus-style VR is two best in one: 3D persistent virtual worlds and stereoscopic facehugger interfaces. The former has had gre…

I’d wait and see how Apple’s device is received before making any long-range pronouncements.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#777

Post by monksy »

ablatt89 wrote: post #87
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This pattern—massive outlays followed by poor, possibly-rushed possibly-underpowered workmanship—sounds remarkably like corruption. I worked at a medium-sized company that went through a phase of hiring ex-FAANG people, thinking we'd improve our quality by implementing FAANG practices. It did the opposite: The ex-FAANG people were absolutely masterful at self-promotion, office politics, and collecting wins for them…

Working for 2x FAANGs, management incentives engineers to work on new features and not on integration testing and optimization. Quality, testing, automation are highly looked down upon and generally don't give huge refreshers come review time. However QA, automation, and testing are not only looked down in FAANG, but the majority of companies and engineers. How often do you see engineers in any company call themselve…

It's amazing how some engineers will try to politic their way out of doing unit tests and will do as much as they can to avoid testing.

It feels like any process that requires discipline, they'll run away from. Theres even tribes of people who will intentionally group all tests as "unit tests." There are other tribes who will try to write all integration or feature tests as "their unit tests". It's pretty frustrating to see a ridged and very well defined group of tests get ignored.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#778

Post by dctoedt »

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.

Akin to not being rewarded for deleting lines of code.*

* unless the deletion measurably improves performance and you get rewarded for the improvement

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#779

Post by dinvlad »

blululu wrote: post #270
dinvlad wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, there're very few modern examples of big companies following this solution.

There are lots of companies that entertain this solution. There are just very few examples of it working for the simple reason that this advice generally doesn't work. We look at the one company that succeeds and "say why didn't we just do that?" without remembering that there were 10 other startups that failed. The more reliable solution is to use the same wisdom of hindsight to pick winners and just buy out the one…

Hmm, could you give a few famous examples that “failed”?

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#780

Post by [deleted] »

modeless wrote: post #327
CamperBob2 wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't be surprised if SD, GPT-3, and other recent releases were what pushed him over the edge and prompted him to leave. He must have felt like he was watching a lot of cool things happen without him. If I had another 30 IQ points I'd be climbing over walls and sneaking into buildings at night to work on this stuff.

I believe he talked about starting work on AGI at the time he went part-time at Meta, long before GPT-3. I encourage anyone to try out some AI related stuff, genius IQ not required. It's still a young field so there aren't yet huge towers of knowledge to climb before you can do anything. The core ideas are actually super simple, requiring nothing more than high school math.

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