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John Carmack Leaves Meta

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Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#841

Post by HandstandMick »

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…

It takes two. If accurate and true, there is an obvious conflict between the two of you. John perhaps didn't listen to your point of view enough and in the reverse you didn't respect his view and role in the company. His success was your success and it would seem you both failed as a result of the conflict. Tech is full of difficult personality and ego. It's multicultural and communication challenges and cultural differences are common are often misinterpreted. At the end of the day though, many of us just want compassion and respect in our roles, to be valued and heard. All said, feel in this described circumstance that perhaps the initial folly was all indeed John's. He held the power after all to make the right start.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#842

Post by ruggeri »

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.

I say this as someone who cares about language, and who has no dog in this Carmack dispute.

I think you are overweighting a fairly simple grammatical error. The commenter expresses themself clearly and logically. It is possible that they don't speak English as a first language, or that they simply are not that careful about making grammatical mistakes. Not everyone is as pedantic about language as you or I may be.

Unreasonable people can write grammatically, and reasonable people can write ungrammatically. I think it is better to judge an argument by its reasonableness.

I think many people would consider your response impolite and unkind to the original poster. Surely you do not want to shame someone for their lack of mastery with the English language? Surely you would rather judge an argument on its merits?

May I suggest a last question: could you see yourself reading this comment to the original poster face-to-face? Does it not seem rude and condescending to imagine yourself doing that?

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#843

Post by Abroszka »

creato wrote: post #388
kentm wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I left FAANG basically because you had to play the politics and self-promotion game to get promoted. Woe be unto you if you worked on a "leaf" system -- something that consumed internal services but did not expose services to other engineering teams. You would have no internal engineers willing to vouch for your promotion because they weren't using your service or codebase. I really wanted to just execute and be rewa…

> I left FAANG basically because you had to play the politics and self-promotion game to get promoted. So then don’t get promoted? I was at two large companies for many years in my career, (almost) everyone’s obsession with promotion was bewildering. A FAANG L5 salary is pretty rewarding for just executing IC work, and that’s about what is expected of that role.

So much this. I might even panic a bit if I got promoted. Nowadays I got so used to the work and tools that I can finish work in less 8 hours on most days. It pays well, I'm having enough free time, low stress because it's the same work I have been doing for a number of years already. Not much politics at my level. I just enjoy it.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#844

Post by methods21 »

With Carmack's amazing talent and vision, unless FB changed somehow, FB is no place for the great Carmack!

Keep programming brother, leave the BS politics to the plebs, and go back out there with YOUR team an fing kill it!!!!

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#845

Post by methods21 »

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…

Carmack has more than proved himself. !

Guess what buddy.... the entire fing executive management team is wading into areas they don't know this about, stabbing each other in the back, slowing progress due to corporate BS.

And so what if Carmack was 'wading into areas where he had no experience'? (What was he showing up at the quarterly internal financial review and advising on advance tax strategy with offshore account to line exec pockets???? ;

When you have a talent like that the organization makes space for them. It was never a cultural fit from the start.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#846

Post by AceyMan »

somehnacct3757 wrote: post #538
comfypotato wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've always thought that TiVo was way ahead of its time. The company is still alive but it feels weird to talk about it in present tense when we've got Roku, Chromecast, Firestick, and Apple TV. Even the era of cable provider DVRs made me feel like TiVo was ahead of its time!

footnote: The TiVo UX was superb but, for my money, ReplayTV was superior, technically.

And, worth mentioning, its UX was not lacking in any perceivable way; OK, maybe less flair & eye candy than TiVo, but also really, really good in its discoverability & daily usability.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#847

Post by phkahler »

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…

>> When data proved his idea was wrong, he would say words to the effect of "I don't care, because I still believe I'm right from an ideological background". He would devalue people, there expertise, there experience, and there thoughts because "I'm John Carmack"

Projecting are you? You're devaluing someone with way more experience and accomplishment than you. Did it ever occur to you that he was right? I've read a lot of his posts that cover ideology, and I always agree. Ideology is what it takes to go big and play a long game. If the short term stuff does fail (even his) it is appropriate to fall back to ideology to figure out what to do next.

I also never saw anything revolutionary in his work. He's really good at selecting practical and straight forward approaches to real problems. If he says "that's stupid and here's why", it's worth listening to even if you can make it work.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#848

Post by the-smug-one »

ruggeri wrote: post #842
gompertz wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

I say this as someone who cares about language, and who has no dog in this Carmack dispute. I think you are overweighting a fairly simple grammatical error. The commenter expresses themself clearly and logically. It is possible that they don't speak English as a first language, or that they simply are not that careful about making grammatical mistakes. Not everyone is as pedantic about language as you or I may be. Un…

> It is possible that they don't speak English as a first language

This is more of a fun side note: It's more likely that they're a native speaker. People who learn English as a second language generally don't make the their/there mix up.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#849

Post by lll-o-lll »

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…

Top down organisation is slow, bureaucratic, and often is bottlenecked for decisions. Inevitably, unless you have monopoly or other form of stickiness, you are quickly outcompeted by the newer nimble organisation. (Hence why companies spend a lot on the stickiness aspect, e.g. Word proprietary format)

Not saying that “flat” works better (or scales). What does work better (with some other downsides) is a distributed system of companies (each internal company operating independently). Still lots of politics around getting the “budget”, still plenty of places to fall down with cross cutting concerns and integrations. Much like a microservice arch vs a monolith, the trade offs can be beneficial at scale.

I’m not sure if Meta is trying to run this way.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#850

Post by LarsDu88 »

qaq wrote: post #808
LarsDu88 wrote: post #675

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How is it even remotley like communism in USSR? Russian empire had the same governance structure since the time of the Golden Horde to present day e.g. very hierarchal top down ...

Right there in the title - Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) Soviets are worker's councils and the individual republics are supposed to have some degree of autonomy on paper. For at least a couple of months in 1917, some amount of collective decision making did happen, although (as you stated) with virtually all Russian governments, it quickly devolved into one-man personality cult enforced by brutality and the machinations of the NKVD.
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