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John Carmack Leaves Meta

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Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#381

Post by HideousKojima »

pengaru wrote: post #164
FormerBandmate wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was Bethesda and Oculus. He isn’t Meta. Meta doesn’t seem to be able to do anything at all. At Facebook it was an unrivaled (yet amoral) champion of social media, but it doesn’t even seem like that now

> He was Bethesda and Oculus. He isn’t Meta. Meta is gargantuan compared to 2009-2013 Bethesda, which frankly seems like a golden handcuffs-era footnote in Carmack's professional history. He isn't even mentioned once in Bethesda's wikipedia page[0]... Oculus seemed far more apropos for a get-shit-done guy like Carmack. Personally I think FB acquiring him/Oculus was an almost certain shitty outcome for the VR technolo…

I'm hoping he brings back Armadillo Aerospace

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#382

Post by happyopossum »

adamsb6 wrote: post #253
mathgladiator wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

> Portal ended up failing so hard as a consumer product that it got transferred over to the Workplace division

The immediate response I heard from everyone who heard about it (not in my tech circle) was an immediate NOPE. Followed by “I’m not letting Facebook put a camera in my house.”

I don’t think the failure can be blamed on the lack of zoom support.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#383

Post by rlt »

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 are a large number of people who would never want to have a private conversation or meeting using Facebook infrastructure or be forced to create a Facebook account to join a meeting.

A large number of people in your circle / on HN / etc perhaps, but I think the vast majority of the general population have no such concern.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#384

Post by javchz »

shp0ngle wrote: post #27

His unscripted talks were amazing. Everytime I watched them I was thinking "ok, the official Meta announcements are corny, but there is still someone that still cares about what is the actual end result;" that's why I was still semi-positive about Meta. Well, I guess not anymore.

I know the whole Oculus / Quest has a reputation for being a gimmick, but those talks were the ones that inspire me to get a quest 2 in the first place, and I love that device, It's far from perfect and requires a lot of 3rd party accessories to be comfortable, but it made me feel the same way as when I was a kid and play a new generation console like the PlayStation for the first time, making me say "wow, this it's the future".

Plus PCVR (something I feel meta lately doesn't push as harder as they should) with the quest it's just amazing, being wireless makes up for the loss in the visual quality of something like an HP Reverb or Vive.

I feel sad about John his departure, he was one of the voices who pushed sideloading for 3rd app developers and those game communities are amazing, creating games that have given me more entertainment than most of the horizon-verse apps.

Even in his last talk about the Quest Pro he was straightforward telling people "This device it's great, but still needs a lot of development and has some rough edges, like FOV rendering is not going to happen soon for most games" to have people don't over hype their expectations... while Mark and the official presentation was using pre-render avatars with legs for a feature that didn't exist.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#385

Post by javchz »

pengaru wrote: post #140

"He is a well known and regarded game designer, who moved to a new consulting role at Oculus in 2019" Err, WAT ? In the context of gamedev, game design is not what I'd say Carmack is known for. He's firmly in 'down in the weeds implementation detail and optimization' territory. How does one write anything about Carmack and get something so fundamentally wrong about who he is and what he's done professionally? Game de…

That's like calling Schwarzenegger a GYM owner... I mean yeah it's not a lie, but it's underselling a lot.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#386

Post by phplovesong »

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…

Damn this rings home.

(Im not comparing my skillset to Carmack, im my eyes hes a god of programming and has an insanely deep skillset and knowledge about so much software related)

Sometimes i feel the same, a new feature is requested and i directly see this is an anti-feature, or just overall a bad decision. I voice my concern, but the client request goes first.

Next up the feature is poorly implemented, usually "just like the client wanted it" without any bigger design. Testing is barely done, and finally it goes to prod. Next is a 3 month period of bugfixes, and ultimately this one feature can take up 60-70% of a devs time.

Then the process repeats.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#387

Post by wahnfrieden »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #376
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?

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.

google has the ai ability but no one has achieved cost scalability yet

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#388

Post by creato »

kentm wrote: post #63
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…

I left FAANG basically because you had to play the politics and self-promotion game to get promoted. Woe be unto you if you worked on a "leaf" system -- something that consumed internal services but did not expose services to other engineering teams. You would have no internal engineers willing to vouch for your promotion because they weren't using your service or codebase. I really wanted to just execute and be rewa…

> I left FAANG basically because you had to play the politics and self-promotion game to get promoted.

So then don’t get promoted? I was at two large companies for many years in my career, (almost) everyone’s obsession with promotion was bewildering. A FAANG L5 salary is pretty rewarding for just executing IC work, and that’s about what is expected of that role.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#389

Post by nunez »

dmix wrote: post #189
mathgladiator wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

The only experiences I've seen of intrapreneurship didn't solve these problems, since funding was guaranteed and their leadership basically worked for the "parent" company.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#390

Post by GekkePrutser »

harrisonjackson wrote: post #235
Blue111 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FB culture is way too positive and happy oh wow.. never thought they could be happy at FB

I interpreted this as coerced positivity and forced happiness. Not organic actual emotion from feeling fulfilled and successful within their role.

Yeah the book "The Circle" (now of course a major motion picture :) really captured that culture well, I thought. A lot of these companies are really like that.
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