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John Carmack Leaves Meta

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Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#821

Post by randmeerkat »

_a_a_a_ wrote: post #810
blueboo wrote: post #801

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might be an exception that proves the rule. Killing a major initiative might’ve been a boon for sibling initiatives m — no wonder those leads applaud an underling who usefully twisted the knife. Politics — is Amazon known for it?…

Or it might not. Have you any reason to search for the negative in a prima facie positive?

> Have you any reason to search for the negative in a prima facie positive?

This article from three days ago: “'Stress, burnout, churn, and a cut-throat atmosphere': An internal Amazon study slams the company's culture.”

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-earths-best-employer-...

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#822

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

Strom wrote: post #786
jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More than that, I think it's important to remember that no one, even a technologist as strong as Carmack, is going to get more right than wrong. Carmack has been a huge inspiration for me over the years. I grew up eagerly reading his plan files. But if we look at the big picture, a lot of his big calls haven't in fact worked out. His vision for the future of graphics was to stick closer to the original OpenGL state m…

> iD tech used to set the standard for the entire industry, but long term its totally lost out to Unreal and Unity. Unless you fault Carmack for selling id to Bethesda, this isn't so much Carmack's fault. He always proposed more sharing of id tech. Look at the older versions of the engine that are available under GPL. Unreal really took over when they started their cheap licensing with source available. Bethesda was…

iD tech was already floundering before the acquisition. I obviously don't fault JC for taking the bag.

Unreal was always far cheaper and way better supported than iD tech. This is something iD got very wrong from the very beginning. iD was "give us 500k, here's a cd rom, and never talk to us again." Epic was considerably less (I forget exactly but I want to say 100k), and was all "ok, here's the email list, here's the news group, here's the IRC channel, and here's some folks you can talk to when you get stuck."

All the Unreal licenses collaborated and helped each other underneath Epic's umbrella. iD licensees had to do again working around iD's hostility/apathy.

There was no comparison in the quality of the toolchains either. Quake's kit did the job, but with a ton of flaky behavior and horrible UX. The BSP code had so many numerical issues level designers were constantly reworking stuff to prevent leaks. Unreal was an absolute dream in comparison.

Cliffy B sending you unsolicited porn pics over IRC was more of a "perk." /s

Source: was contracted on an Unreal port to the Playstation 1 by Infogrames back in the day.

Again, JC is one of my personal heroes, but I think people are reluctant to point out he got a lot of stuff just wrong vs choices others made. His tendency towards contrarian independence is a double edged sword.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#823

Post by m3kw9 »

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…

Like how twitter is run right now

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#824

Post by grumple »

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.

You need people to say no. You should be saying no more than yes in most cases. You have more important, more profitable paths to take.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#825

Post by selfhoster11 »

azinman2 wrote: post #282
nonethewiser wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respect your elders

But that’s not the gen z way. Part of being young is thinking you’d somehow do it all differently in the same circumstances.

“Beware an old man in a profession where men die young”

I am in my late 20s, and I think there’s plenty to learn from the past that still applies to the world of today. When a seasoned veteran says something, I shut up and listen, because there’s often a learnable tidbit there, or at least a fun war story.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#826

Post by nocsi »

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.

Grammatical mistakes aren’t a means to disprove anything. Not everyone is detail oriented and I doubt it prevented anyone from understanding the meaning of what they were saying. Their post wasn’t even technical, more like a stream of thought

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#827

Post by herval »

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…

As a counterpoint, this does add to Google's already established reputation of not shipping stuff. "No men" are generally a bad idea, they kill innovation and slow things down.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#828

Post by broknbottle »

adamsb6 wrote: post #253
mathgladiator wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He isn't alone. A core problem is that FB culture is way too positive and happy, and hard criticism is received poorly. The politics to get anything done if your name isn't Mark is borderline impossible. I left a year ago, and I've become beyond happy.

I joined back in 2014 and left this year. I feel like I got to enjoy a couple of years before the company started to lose its nimbleness. Feedback groups used to get responses from the people that actually built the things instead of contractors whose primary function is feedback group triage. Sometimes you could actually have an impact by giving feedback, and you could see others having those impacts as well. When I…

The portal devices wouldn't have succeeded even if it came with lunch voucher for a 1:1 with the Zuck himself. The devices failed as a consumer product due to years of Facebook disregarding users privacy and their focus on growth at all costs. Zuck has become nothing more than a meme ceo and the only reason he hasn't been removed by the board is because of the king like structure that he has setup for himself.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#829

Post by baby »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #675
troupe wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You’re supposed to lead without authority John seems to be particularly calling out that he was not able to influence the people with high enough rank to make decisions. So it sounds like he at least thought there was an authority structure there wasn't as flat as you describe.

Valve is a great example of how this doesn't work in practice. Jeri Ellsworth got fired and revealed that the supposedly flat hierarchy at Valve is really composed of informal cliques - with the most influential groups having a direct line to the CEO/ Kinda what happened to communism in Russia, if you think about it

The flat org of fb I described is not really flat the way Valve is. Valve is truly flat from what I understand, whereas the one at facebook is not but encourage people to behave like it is.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#830

Post by baby »

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…

The stock tanking really have no relation with the performance or the engineering happening inside.
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