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John Carmack Leaves Meta

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Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#411

Post by smallerfish »

fs111 wrote: post #398
dev_tty01 wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 Have you ever heard of Whatsapp? More than a billion people use it for private communication daily. Maybe not in the US, but elsewhere on the planet. You know who owns Whatsapp? Meta does.

Whatsapp had already carved out its market (because of SMS being charged for in its initial markets) before Facebook acquired it. https://www.statista.com/statistics/260819/number-of-monthly...

Granted that they've at least tripled MAU since, but that's the power of network effects. There's a heavy dose of "in spite of" rather than "because of". On the other hand if Meta tried to, say, merge Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger, I think they'd lose half their users overnight.

Similarly, if Meta bought Zoom (and kept it running as it does today), most businesses probably wouldn't switch. Zoom already owns the market.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#412

Post by [deleted] »

kernal wrote: post #324
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…

>It is simply stunning that the seasoned direction and counsel that someone of John Carmack’s caliber is capable of delivering was not being followed. He worked for an Ad company that voraciously mined through their user's data. Unless he was able to find new ways to monetize their users or bypass iOS's opt in app tracking, I see no reason why they would even care.

[deleted]

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#413

Post by nrp »

dinvlad wrote: post #203
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…

Sadly, there're very few modern examples of big companies following this solution.

Cisco tried a fairly extreme version of this, but a new CEO put an end to it due in part to morale damage in the bulk of the company not working on those projects: https://www.ft.com/content/a81c934c-cb31-11e9-af46-b09e8bfe6...

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#414

Post by jemmyw »

m463 wrote: post #357
RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically I felt reassured reading this. "[...] I'm evidently not persuasive enough. A good fraction of the things I complain about eventually turn my way after [...] evidence piles up" especially resonates with me. While I rationally understand it's just corporate bureaucracy / politics, sometimes I still wonder if I were just a bit more capable I'd be more persuasive. If John fucking Carmack cannot move the bureau…

It's hard to walk this line. I think some people are forthright and outspoken, but a long game persuasion might be the best strategy sometimes. I remember Linus Torvalds commenting on systemd, and accepting the work with upstanding neutrality (I wished he had rejected the binary log files) "I don't actually have any particularly strong opinions on systemd itself. I've had issues with some of the core developers that…

Could he actually reject it though? The kernel has to interact with all kinds of other interfaces and I'm sure Linus doesn't like a lot of them - he's certainly commented as such. But if there's a binary logging system used by some distros and good code is submitted to the kernel to interact with it, it wouldn't be great if he rejected it on a philosophical basis. They make it work well, not dictate what you do with it.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#415

Post by georgeecollins »

nomel wrote: post #129
annadane wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forcing a mandatory Facebook account is "doing an ok job"...?

There is no mandatory Facebook account, anymore. It's now a mandatory Meta account. Facebook is only linked if you want it to be. Meta has said that this was in response to disapproval of the mandatory Facebook account.

Right, but they took a perfectly good (great for the time and the price) and messed it up for a couple years with a really ugly, oversharing, privacy threatening account system. I am sure many-- probably most-- people didn't care but I think early adopters and developers found it very alienating.

People say that the Meta account-- or the old Oculus accounts-- is the same as the FB account they mandated but really that isn't true. For a while they were essentially forcing you to run FB on your phone or browser to use the hardware. It was super yucky.

I really like their hardware and I appreciate that they are working on developing a platform. I just wish they could be content to sell a platform and sell aps on it, the way Apple does.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#416

Post by SuperQue »

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?

Google ended up with a bunch of chat apps because the culture promotes building new over keeping things running.

The first chat was basically an XMPP service. It was decent, it federated outside of Google, it was fully functional. It even supported group channels (XMPP conferences) internally. But I don't think that was ever exposed to the public.

Then Hangouts was created. It was, per usual at Gooogle, a ground-up rewrite. IIRC not the same team. So they spent at least a couple years playing catch up to get feature parity with the XMPP chat. Worse, Hangouts was one of the first services to suffer from strict team-created "Personas" design philosophy. Any time anyone would complain about a feature, or miss-feature, it was flatly ignored because "You're not one of our Personas". It took years of complaints to get them to change their minds.

By the time Hangouts was good enough to fully replace the previous service it was now boring and people left the team for other new projects. Because maintenance won't get you promoted.

The other random chat services were basically experiential toys.

Now we have Meet, which is is likely another case of "Hangouts is unmaintainable tech, we need to re-write it". Years of getting up to feature parity. And miss-features that won't get fixed.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#417

Post by david38 »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #374
dev_tty01 wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I highly doubt it. What percentage of those people spend money on FB?

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#418

Post by Geee »

Razengan wrote: post #105
srajabi wrote: post #7

Basically Carmack is frustrated by: 1. Rate of progress on AR/VR at meta 2. People within Meta not "Giving a Dam!" / Poor decisions made within the org 3. Poor quality of the execution which I guess is related to #2 Relevant quote: "It pains me to hear people say that they don't even get their headset out to show off at the company because they know it's going to be a mess of charging and updating before they can mak…

I rarely put my VR headset on because I have to COMMIT to it and stop doing everything else; i.e. no host OS's GUI is VR-friendly. Why did smartphones supersede computers in usage? and laptops supersede desktops? because of the low commitment barrier: something you can pick up and put down at any time without necessarily pausing other activities, is always going to be preferred by the masses. So all current VR is sit…

One cool thing Apple can do is display mirroring from all your devices into VR. They also have 3D models of all their products, so they can redraw your devices inside VR without needing to use see-through AR. Keyboard, mouse and display with mirrored UI. iPhone and Watch too.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#419

Post by glial »

nobodyandproud wrote: post #193
yawnxyz wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's so wild to me that FAANG has these hiring walls set up — like crazy coding challenges — only for the best engineers to then do work equivalent to what you see at gov't or consulting jobs. Why do they make it so hard to work for them, just for their employees to play status games?

So FAANG has set themselves up to hire retain sharp STEM grads who are savvy at politics. That’s a very small subset of the STEM population. Small anecdote : I’ve noticed that Ivy leaguers tend to be very polished and particularly good at the game.

I've always thought that learning how to play the game was the primary value proposition of an Ivy League education. You can learn mechanical engineering or whatever just as well elsewhere.

Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta

#420

Post by lukemercado »

urthor wrote: post #395
m463 wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to walk this line. I think some people are forthright and outspoken, but a long game persuasion might be the best strategy sometimes. I remember Linus Torvalds commenting on systemd, and accepting the work with upstanding neutrality (I wished he had rejected the binary log files) "I don't actually have any particularly strong opinions on systemd itself. I've had issues with some of the core developers that…

With those big companies, commonly there simply isn't a productive way to walk the line. Saving face and preserving "decision making credibility" means that taking advice is simply not on the cards for a large portion of the middle management class.

> Saving face and preserving "decision making credibility" means that taking advice is simply not on the cards for a large portion of the middle management class.

While I'm happy to admit that this construct may be true in practice; it is _deeply_ infuriating that so many people's calculus nets out in this manner. It's infuriating to me, primarily, because I simply don't understand. By my understanding, "decision making credibility" comes _exclusively_ from *being right*. If you're optimizing for this metric, then how you get there should be an almost irrelevant footnote.

Yet here we are; with a non-trivial percentage of managers coming to the conclusion that the correct answer is to not take advice.

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