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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

#111

Post by ninkendo »

phaser wrote: post #66
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #3

> 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"

> Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren't adding value

I’d be interested to hear more about the context for this, since it sounds perfectly reasonable, enough that it’s triggering some cognitive dissonance with my general hatred for Musk.

It’s a truism in most companies that meetings tend to have too many people for no good reason. It’s just too easy to add extra people “just in case”, or adding whole teams when you only really needed one person, etc… and as an IC I’ve been in roles where I was in back to back meetings literally all day, leaving no time to actually get my work done. A policy of “if it’s obvious to you that a meeting doesn’t need you, feel free to walk out” sounds very reasonable to me.

Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days

#112

Post by schmuhblaster »

gtowey wrote: post #28
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #3

> 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...

Wisdom is not appreciated in our industry. Everyone in tech with a modicum of status or power thinks they got there because they're smarter than everyone else and there is nothing of value to be learned from others. Thus, our leaders blunder in to the same mistakes everyone else is making over and over again. We never learn.

This somehow resonates with me and I feel this is one of the negative side effects of a CS/Maths dominated culture and mindset that strongly emphasizes intellectual achievement, but hasn’t yet matured enough to appreciate the more messy and irrational parts of our existence.

Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days

#113

Post by casey2 »

They could have, I'm not convinced they would have. It's very difficult for designers to come up with something novel and good. Most of the amazing things you with old tech are backports of ideas that only exist because people using new tech had them.

Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days

#114

Post by retr0rocket »

raverbashing wrote: post #44
CamperBob2 wrote: post #5

I 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…

> It was Carmack's job to assert technological dominance and give the industry its next generation of game engines. Did they really? Did ID make more money with engine licensing than with game sales? They needed to ship. I think Quake Engine could wait, and have Doom++ would have given them some slack This is the opposite to the Boeing problem (shipping the rehashed product instead of the brand new thing)

[dead]

Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days

#115

Post by rustyhancock »

> So if my theorem is correct, and Quake gutted id Software, was it worth it? Well I'd say yes absolutely. Games are more important than game companies, and Quake is an iconic titan of the gaming world.

Sandy's quote here buried unfortunately by X.

Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days

#116

Post by newsoftheday »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #86
logicchains wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's let GTA6 be the judge of that.

We don't need to wait for GTA 6. RDR 2 was already a serious letdown from the first game. Rockstar has lost sight of the fact that they are making games , not movies, and that games need to be fun to play. RDR 2 is significantly less fun to play than its predecessor because they are constantly trying to shove cinematic moments and immersion into the game.

I enjoyed Deus Ex: Mankind Divided but even it had too many cut scenes, come to think of it, so did Metro Exodus.

Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days

#117

Post by Jare »

jacobgold wrote: post #64
john_strinlai wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 underst…

> if John Carmack wants to create another breakthrough technology, he might be better off re-creating id Software’s 1995 chaos

Chaos is not what made them great. It was definitely part of who they were at the time, and thus part of their greatness. If you try to recreate chaos without recreating everything else within which that chaos happened to work, you will be miserable and also fail.

I suspect JC had plenty enough "being on the other side of chaos" during his VR days. It's not fun at all when it's someone else's chaos that you have to endure.

I'd agree you do need intensity in order to create breakthroughs. Not gonna happen in a "don't worry about it" type of environment.

Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days

#118

Post by curiousObject »

epistasis wrote: post #65
s20n wrote: post #2

xcancel 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.

Thanks. Here’s a direct xcancel link to the complete chain of Sandy’s posts that John Carmack replied to.

https://xcancel.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/206959220964578529...

Interesting to hear about the conflicts and real personal suffering. In spite of that, they built a classic genre-defining game together

Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days

#119

Post by wang_li »

jacobgold wrote: post #69
madduci wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I believe id paid him to port ctf to Quake 2 and Quake 3.

Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days

#120

Post by sidewndr46 »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #3

> 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...

unless I'm mistaken John Carmack is unbelievably wealthy. Like give away a Ferrari and start a rocket company for fun wealthy. There's a number of people who read this and conclude that the message is you can't push someone hard enough, it's impossible to fail if you just push hard enough.
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