John Carmack Leaves Meta • Hacker News Board

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#371

Post by lullab » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 5:59 AM UTC

mathgladiator wrote: post #153

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…

He isn't alone. A core problem is that FB culture is way too positive and happy, and hard criticism is received poorly. The politics to get anything done if your name isn't Mark is borderline impossible. I left a year ago, and I've become beyond happy.

It sounds as if the company itself does not have a 'dislike' button.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#372

Post by MikusR » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 6:01 AM UTC

1auralynn wrote: post #312

MikusR wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carmack was the one who was pushing for mobile.

Yeah in my opinion him pushing so hard for GearVR seriously negatively impacted the industry. Tons of people had their first intro to VR be some crappy 360 video on mobile VR and it did lasting damage to society's perception of VR

Crappy 360 video on mobile had nothing to do with gearvr.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#373

Post by doktorhladnjak » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 6:03 AM UTC

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #342

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This pattern—massive outlays followed by poor, possibly-rushed possibly-underpowered workmanship—sounds remarkably like corruption. I worked at a medium-sized company that went through a phase of hiring ex-FAANG people, thinking we'd improve our quality by implementing FAANG practices. It did the opposite: The ex-FAANG people were absolutely masterful at self-promotion, office politics, and collecting wins for them…

Dang, man. Where do you work that this ruthless self promotion (and denigration of all else) is not the norm? That’s been my experience throughout my 27 years, in 3 Fortune 250’s AND 2 mom-and-pop’s.

Same. I’ve been at companies that paid really well and ones that only paid ok. We still had to go through all these hoops. All things equal, I might as well get paid better.

Moreover, it wasn’t better than the smaller startups I’ve worked at either. There was little self promotion because your connections mattered more than what you did or your impact. If you weren’t in the club with founders and other early employees, you were a have-not.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#374

Post by spaceman_2020 » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 6:04 AM UTC

dev_tty01 wrote: post #352

adamsb6 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I joined back in 2014 and left this year. I feel like I got to enjoy a couple of years before the company started to lose its nimbleness. Feedback groups used to get responses from the people that actually built the things instead of contractors whose primary function is feedback group triage. Sometimes you could actually have an impact by giving feedback, and you could see others having those impacts as well. When I…

>I think Portal is a perfect example of how slow to adapt the company has become. It's a fantastic video conferencing device, certainly the best at its price point. We happened to enter the pandemic with this device already available for sale, but we completely failed to capitalize on it. Thanks for your insight, but the Portal failure shouldn't be surprising. There are a large number of people who would never want t…

There is an even larger group of people who happily used Facebook’s products to stay in touch before, during, and after the pandemic.

For much of the world, Whatsapp video calls were the standard way to keep in touch.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#375

Post by lambdatronics » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 6:05 AM UTC

lovecg wrote: post #320

methodical wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "If you solve a few more problems" The amount of work done by these 7 words is incredible. ChatGPT is far from changing a "lot" of industries. Still pathetic at programming (which isn't its purpose, but is AlphaCode's purpose; which also sucks), use of it for copy writing is nullified since it seems Google will crack down on AI generated copy writing. DALL-E is also a nice party trick but far from being particularl…

It boggles my mind that people are now dismissive towards technology that would have been literal science fiction _a year ago_ while at the same time being pessimistic about future progress.

Just going back and look at GPT-2's output, it's amazing how much better this system is. It still doesn't "understand" anything, but the coherence of what it spits out has gone up drastically.

https://thegradient.pub/gpt2-and-the-nature-of-intelligence/

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#376

Post by spaceman_2020 » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 6:06 AM UTC

solardev wrote: post #221

dmix wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a classic middle management malaise where everyone gets paid so well they don’t want to stir the pot? The bureaucracy and protection of today’s money cows which only clouds them from seeing tomorrow’s cows that will rescue them from certain obscurity? The Clayton M Christensen solution to big companies ignoring obvious problems is to have isolated small teams “infrapreneurship” who aren’t under the pressures…

Is that how Google ended up with eight chat apps while Search gets worse and worse every year?

I’m willing to bet that that’s also how Google will be completely disrupted by an AI-first competitor. The execs will be too chicken to kill their current golden goose.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#377

Post by HideousKojima » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 6:07 AM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #358

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…

That saying about how teenagers and twenty year old think they're immortal? There's some variant of that for programmers. That failure mode is something that happens to other people, to suckers, so I don't have to change direction because some guy who's going grey at the temples tells me I'm walking toward a cliff. I've been in places where my job became a bit of a cleaner, for things that shouldn't have needed to be…

I dunno man. I think I'm a pretty good dev, but if John Carmack told me I was wrong about a technical issue/overall technical direction I'd give him some serious consideration. The only time I can recall disagreeing with him was a few years ago when he said people who want better gaming on Linux should focus on improving Wine instead of native support. And it turns out he was largely correct there and I was wrong, if Valve's success with Proton is any indication.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#378

Post by spaceman_2020 » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 6:07 AM UTC

dmix wrote: post #247

solardev wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that how Google ended up with eight chat apps while Search gets worse and worse every year?

Monopolies tend to stick around much longer than other industries despite their lack of competence. Clayton’s book was mostly about Intel which operated in a competitive market with AMD and others. DuckDuckGo is great but it’s not nipping at their heels meaningfully.

ChatGPT is increasingly handling the bulk of my major queries, and that’s when its rate limited and hard to access (behind a sign up, behind captcha)

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#379

Post by rossjudson » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 6:07 AM UTC

lolinder wrote: post #126

throwabayhay wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I left FAANG basically because you had to play the politics and self-promotion game to get promoted. I have no reason to doubt that in the particular corner of your organization that may well have been the case, but you cannot generalize this over the whole field. As stated elsewhere, I never played any game to be promoted, I simply never consciously sought the goal of promotion, and I was promoted anyway just beca…

We have multiple people giving their anecdotes saying big tech positions emphasize self-promotion, and one anecdote (yours) saying they don't. So, sincere question: for those of us who haven't worked at a FAANG, why should we believe that your experience is the norm while the other people's is the "corner"?

These companies are cities, not villages. You'll find every type of experience at them. You'll find some incredibly exciting work, some boring work, great managers, crap managers, and everything in between all of that.

In my case I just find scale...fun :)

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#380

Post by hinkley » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 6:08 AM UTC

version_five wrote: post #173

posharma wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Success in the corporate world requires more than technical prowess. One of those things is influence. It's not for everyone.

That can be true, it's also definitely what people say at a failing org that has become bureaucratic and political and doesn't value technical skill. I have seen this first hand. There's such thing as an asshole that nobody can work with of course. But overall it's a red flag when accomplished people leave an org because "it's not for everyone".

I had a coworker once who had as an annual goal "convince the director of engineering of X" - given to them by the Director of Engineering. Dude, you should never have agreed to that. Responsibility for something you have no control over is a bad day waiting to happen.

One of the people who made it on my Never Again list was a technical lead who somehow thought "bring me solutions, not problems" was a reasonable thing for a technical lead to say. In a large, complex system that you built the person who's been there for a hot minute knows enough to see problems but not enough of the interactions to know the solution. You're supposed to tell me how to fix it, or fix it yourself, not deflect. Took a couple years before I could actually fix any of the problems and there are still bits of code that just look like a Shadow over Innsmouth to me.