https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845832
Some more reading on his work ethic from John himself on this very site.
There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days
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Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days
#62It's a little silly to revisit your mistakes like this, as if you could have done anything better. Most companies are poorly managed and produce nothing of value. The team at id Software changed the world and produced an absolute masterpiece. Quake 1 was, in many ways, where id Software peaked. But the time Carmack spent optimizing Quake Live, based on Quake 3, ultimately made it his twitch FPS magnum opus. Even 20 y…
Frankly, Unreal Tournament got a lot of that energy and peaked gameplay. Very new fresh ideas like capture the flag back then was really cool. And the speed and stability was also great.
Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days
#63> I pushed everyone too hard. I didn’t appreciate how maturing companies need more slack, and that running people at startup intensity constantly will wear them out. Sounds like wisdom many companies might consider...
Tell that to Elon, Zuckerberg and the like
Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days
#64It's a little silly to revisit your mistakes like this, as if you could have done anything better. Most companies are poorly managed and produce nothing of value. The team at id Software changed the world and produced an absolute masterpiece. Quake 1 was, in many ways, where id Software peaked. But the time Carmack spent optimizing Quake Live, based on Quake 3, ultimately made it his twitch FPS magnum opus. Even 20 y…
> It's silly to revisit your mistakes like this revisiting mistakes (in a healthy, non-obsessive way) is not silly at all. it is great for self growth, and in this case, is a great way to pass on wisdom.
The actual quote is "It's a little silly to revisit your mistakes like this, as if you could have done anything better."
What you're saying sounds very nice and correct, except it isn’t necessarily true.
It's extremely easy to draw wrong lessons in retrospect. There are so many variables, including personalities, market conditions, timing, constraints, and accidents of history. You can't recall or even really understand these things with any level of accuracy.
What ends up being most useful is the way experience fundamentally changes you as a person, not your regretful shower thoughts posted on Twitter.
So it may seem counterintuitive, but if John Carmack wants to create another breakthrough technology, he might be better off re-creating id Software’s in 1995, including the chaos, rather than trying to avoid it by applying all his "lessons learned".
Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days
#65xcancel link: https://xcancel.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2069799283369345247
Thank you, this link allows clicking through to see Sandy's original thread, which is very informative and very necessary context.
Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days
#66> I pushed everyone too hard. I didn’t appreciate how maturing companies need more slack, and that running people at startup intensity constantly will wear them out. Sounds like wisdom many companies might consider...
They could. But they rather get their "wisdom" from Steve Jobs trivia romanticizing the grind and being an asshole.
Like Elon Musk, who once wrote in a company-wide email in 2018: "Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren't adding value"
Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days
#67I agree with one of the comments: "'Coulda been Doom++' hides how everyone wanted the leap back then." Doom++ was already well under way in the form of Ken Silverman's Build engine. Duke Nukem 3D beat Quake to market by ~6 months as I recall. A shorter timeline on the latter would have put them in direct competition with each other, damaging both. It was Carmack's job to assert technological dominance and give the in…
I think it's quite fine to acknowledge that you pushed someone or some group of people to hard as a leader. A genre defining game is not the sort of thing that deserves wrecking someone. We may appreciate the game that came out the other end while acknowledging that it may not have been worth the cost.
Interestingly, as I read the thread that spawned this reply, Sandy appears to argue that in fact it was worth it, despite being personally “wrecked” and believing it might have been done differently.
Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days
#68Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days
#69It's a little silly to revisit your mistakes like this, as if you could have done anything better. Most companies are poorly managed and produce nothing of value. The team at id Software changed the world and produced an absolute masterpiece. Quake 1 was, in many ways, where id Software peaked. But the time Carmack spent optimizing Quake Live, based on Quake 3, ultimately made it his twitch FPS magnum opus. Even 20 y…
Frankly, Unreal Tournament got a lot of that energy and peaked gameplay. Very new fresh ideas like capture the flag back then was really cool. And the speed and stability was also great.
Unreal was great single player and fun for multiplayer but there's no comparison in terms of the way the game played competitively vs Quake.
And CTF originally was from Quake 1, the threewave CTF mod by Zoid which made it into Quake 3.
Threewave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFg2PPOmA74
Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days
#70This was just a long winded way of insulting Sandy but making it look professional, from what I can see. He is saying directly that Sandy was a bad designer with a poor sense of visual aesthetics.
Seems pretty gross and catty to me.