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John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

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Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#251

Post by aprilthird2021 »

gmueckl wrote: post #233
labrador wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I was on that team I'd welcome the opportunity to tell John Carmac why he was wrong or if I agreed start looking for another project to work on. When I was on nuclear submarines we'd call what you are advocating "keep us in the dark and feed us bullshit."

This assumes that you would be sincerely listened to, which you wouldn't in a case like this. Higher ups in large organizations don't have the bandwidth to listen to everybody. Your sub's officers also need to constantly be aware of what to communicate to whom and in which language. Your superiors certainly kept you in the dark about a ton of concerns that were on their plate because simply mentioning them to subordi…

You say your piece and if not heard, do an internal transfer. This whole don't tell people the truth about technical matters to not hurt their feelings or disrupt some people's paychecks is not serious business.

Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#252

Post by gafferongames »

alanbernstein wrote: post #241
firesteelrain wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could argue that if it’s not in your swim lane, you just let it fail. And if you aren’t that person’s manager, you tell them the code or design that you are reviewing and thus the gatekeeper is not adequate. Politely. You said your part and no need to get yourself in trouble. Document and move on. If the company won’t listen then you move on. No need to turn it into a HR issue.

Carmack's swim lane was exceptionally wide. My understanding was that this sort of criticism was actually his main job duty.

Imagine being a meta engineer and not taking Carmack's advice seriously.

Why the fuck is he even hired there if you are not going to listen to him.

Dude has forgotten more things about game development than you will ever know...

Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#255

Post by emmelaich »

throwway120385 wrote: post #149
twelvedogs wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would that be better than just grabbing a bsd and starting with that, PlayStation and Apple did it and actually ended up with functional products

Hell, if you're Meta you could just by QNX from RIM.

I wonder how well that would play out. Surely you'd only do if you got a perpetual license or bought it outright. I can imagine RIM would fuck you over eventually with with any other arrangement.

(Actually I just realised you meant "buy")

Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#256

Post by cherrycherry98 »

markus_zhang wrote: post #220
Fade_Dance wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember watching Carmack at a convention 15 years ago. He took a short sabbatical and came back with ID Tech 3 on an iPhone, and it still looks amazing well over a decade later. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52hMWMWKAMk&t=1s This is a guy who figures that what he wants to do most with his 3 free weekends is to port his latest, greatest engine to a Cortex-A8. Leading corporate strategy? Maybe not. But Carmack on…

Impressive. JC is always one of the engineers I look up to and read up to when depressed. John Carmack, David Cutler, Tom West, Cameron Zwarich, etc. There are about maybe 50 of them.

Tim Sweeney of Epic is up there for me too.

Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#257

Post by stephc_int13 »

spydum wrote: post #222
stephc_int13 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carmack is a legend and I admire his work, but he seems to believe his own legend these days (like a few others big-ego gamedevs) and that can lead to arbitrary preferences being sold as gospel.

I'm sure that's true but I've worked with a lot of engineers that are of this caliber and as long as you can form a coherent logical explanation they will bend they're way more open than you expect. But you got to put in the work to make that argument. They won't take it on faith

It is an entirely different thing, gifted, highly experienced and confident in his assertions is quite frequent, but the cult-like following and status of personalities like Carmack or Blow can seriously alter their own self perception and importance.

Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#258

Post by emmelaich »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #84
Inityx wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll offer a different interpretation: If a professional can't give critical feedback in a professional setting without being rude or belittling others, then they need to improve their communication skills.

Having worked in the valley, I've seen what critical feedback meant in many companies there, and it removes all usefulness of the info because there is a ceiling of what is socially acceptable to say; therefore, you can't know how bad or urgent things are. Everything is ASAP. They are super excited about everything. And nothing you do is wrong, it just could be improved or they like it but don't love it. You don't kn…

I'd just quote Mourinho / Carlsen. "If I say anything I'm in big trouble".

Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#259

Post by dedup-com »

WD-42 wrote: post #193
dagmx wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

John can be quite blunt and harsh in person, from everyone I know who’s interacted with him. If he doesn’t believe in something, he can sometimes be over critical and it’s hard to push back in that kind of power imbalance.

Which makes sense when you are one of 3 developers at ID software. There's absolutely no room for waste. This is Meta. Let the kids build their operating system ffs. Is he now more concerned with protecting shareholder value? Who cares.

There were almost no kids on the XROS team. The bulk of the team were E6s with graying hairs, multiple kids, and very impressive history of work on other well-known operating systems -- and most of them wrote a lot of code. This was the senior-est team I ever was a member of. Also, the most enjoyable interview process I've ever been through, no bullshit whatsoever and a rare case that I actually had to implement the exact thing that I was asked about during the interview (took me 3 weeks compared to 20 minutes during the loop, go figure).

XROS was an org that hired for specific specialist positions (as opposed to the usual "get hired into FB, go through the bootcamp, and find your place within the company"). At one point we got two separate requests from the recruiting execs: - Your tech screen pass rate is way too low compared to other teams at FB. Please consider making your tech screen easier to expand the pool of candidates. - Your interview-to-offer rate is way too low compared to other teams at FB. Please consider making your tech screen more difficult to reduce time that engineers spend on interviewing and writing feedback.

Anyway, IMO it was a very strong team in a very wrong environment. Most of the folks on the team hated the Facebook culture, despised the PSC process (despite having no problems with delivering impact in a greenfield project), had very little respect for non-technical managers coming from FB proper (the XROS team saw themselves as part of Oculus), and the majority I believe fled to other companies as soon as the project was scrapped. The pay was good however, and the work was very interesting. My overall impression was that most people on the team saw XROS as a journey, not a destination, and it was one of the reasons why it was destined to never ship.

Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#260

Post by CyberDildonics »

nashashmi wrote: post #239
dmazzoni wrote: post #236

I was at Google when the Flutter team started building Fuchsia. They had amazing talent. Seriously, some of the most brilliant engineers I've worked with. They had a huge team. Hundreds of people. It was so ambitious. But it seemed like such a terrible idea from the start. Nobody was ever able to articulate who would ever use it. Technically, it was brilliant. But there was no business plan. If they wanted to build a…

Wasn’t Fuchsia supposed to be a platform where different OS could run in a virtual environment and software packages would be complete containers? Was not this a new way of tackling the ancient OS problem? These were my imaginations. I thought maybe an OS that could run on the web. Or an OS that could be virtualized to run on several machines. Or an OS that could be run along several other instances on the same machi…

Reinventing QNX will be cutting edge for decades to come.
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