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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

#131

Post by _doctor_love »

schmuhblaster wrote: post #112
gtowey wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am a great admirer of the late Dr. Richard Hamming and he said basically the same thing. Math and science education is important, but humanities is missing for most engineers to their great detriment.

I have a BA in Economics though I am a 20-year software veteran and I can honestly say that this degree has probably helped my career more than any CS knowledge I have. My family was also heavily into the humanities in general, plus a number of my parents were in leadership positions (both corporate and military). All the stories I heard growing up had to do with people and social relations, literally never anything technical. (For context, one of my parents has an electrical engineering background and was a hardware startup founder.)

Human factors dominate all other factors and most engineers/devs/whatever tend to learn this way too late in their career. There's a sincere but ultimately naive hope that if the tech could just be really excellent then all that messy human stuff just wouldn't be a problem.

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

#132

Post by [deleted] »

CamouflagedKiwi wrote: post #32
tejohnso wrote: post #4

Quake III Arena was pretty entertaining. Doesn't seem like it came from a company that had been ruined for years. I definitely noticed something around the Doom 3 release many years after Quake III Arena. The new game just didn't seem to have the same industry pushing, genre changing energy. Or maybe I was just older and had moved on, and didn't care as much.

In the original thread Carmack was replying to, Sandy Petersen said Q3 was the only other great game they produced after that: https://xcancel.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/206959226489744192... Honestly I think Doom is where it came together the best, Quake was technically better (of course) but it was not a better game.

[deleted]

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

#134

Post by mynameajeff »

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 guess I shouldn't be surprised at all given how different people's tastes and preferences are, but I couldn't feel any less in agreement. RDR2 was an incredible experience I still haven't come close to completing purely due t my enjoyment of the immersive content you're deriding. It's not a perfect games by any means but the amount of awe I get from the systems in the game and the immersion it gives me is enough to have me extremely excited for GTA 6 as someone who was previously extremely skeptical of it living up to anywhere near its hype.

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

#135

Post by palmotea »

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.

> 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.

It's not just people "with a modicum of status or power," it's almost everywhere in tech. Just look at all the software engineers that contemptuously look down on other fields (except maybe hard science and economics), or talk like they're experts because they read a couple of papers.

IIRC there was a recent blog post or article (I wish I could find it) that had a nice section just running through a series of software-engineer ideas (like Effective Altruism), and pointing out they're basically re-inventing wheels that were already better explored by Philosophy. And the people who do that think they're brilliant innovators.

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

#136

Post by manphone »

aurareturn wrote: post #87
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...

Many founders/bosses often think that their employees are lazy because they don't work as hard as they do. They usually forget that their employees are usually paid a lot less or have magnitudes less equity. Not everyone owns 15% of the company. I will grind too if I'm paid well enough and the potential reward is worth it.

Yeah, this is my favorite one, the number of CEOs I’ve had tell me that they were frustrated how little everyone else was putting in compared to them while they’ve had hundreds of times of the return is hilarious.

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

#137

Post by kcexn »

schmuhblaster wrote: post #112
gtowey wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a side effect of rewarding 20-somethings with lots of money to do 'smart' things with stuff they learn in an undergraduate degree.

It's easy to conflate recognition with achievement when that's all you know in life.

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

#138

Post by _doctor_love »

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.

> We never learn.

To my mind, the key is that it's leaders who never learn. The sad thing is that the system gives them no incentives to do so. If you look into the work of Bob Emiliani, this seems to be the tragic conclusion he's come to in recent years. We "know" all the right things to do, but time and time again, management dehumanizes the floor staff and refuses to listen. It's often not even out of malice but because that leader simply has no reason whatsoever to change.

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

#139

Post by thaw13579 »

lokimedes wrote: post #9

Young energy shouldn’t be apologized. Apparently Bill Gates had that psycho energy too, Jobs and many others too. On a civilizational scale it seems like a net benefit that young, eager and driven people give a bit more than they wanted to in retrospect. It do indeed change things for the rest of us. The patriotic call of armed forces has been driven by this for millennia. At least Carmack and Co. chose their own mis…

That's literally treating people as means to an end, when it's not clear if the "end" even required sacrificing young people's lives. In the grand scheme of things, why not spend an extra year to build at a pace that doesn't burn people out? If you look at the careers of the people who subsequently left, by Sandy's account, they went on to to run their own great game studios, so it's not clear that a grind was necessary.

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

#140

Post by Jtarii »

Drupon wrote: post #99
mikeocool wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure it’s necessarily a given that what Jobs, Gates, and Carmack created are net-positives when talking on a civilizational scale. Though Carmack certainly gets credit for keeping me entertained for a good portion of my youth. And gates probably gets some civilizational credit for what he’s done with his wealth after he made it.

[flagged]

I think he is talking more about the malaria foundation.
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