Carmack is a developer god, but against stupidity, the very gods themselves contend in vain.
John Carmack Leaves Meta
481–490 of 1001 posts
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#482Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#483Earlier quoted context omitted.
I interpret this as strong circumstantial evidence that companies who start out as engineering centric and claims to be meritocratic eventually deteriorate into good ole nepotistic power play and a sea of bureaucracy. It’s quite entertaining to observe even John Carmack go through this very relatable frustration.
It's interesting how universal this pattern seems to be.
We’re just uppity primates so our group dynamics are always going to be dominated by our social instincts.
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#484The metaverse is a castle in the sky nobody can make it what Meta or John Carmack wants it to be.
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#485”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…
Throwaway because it could be easy to identify my position from my normal account name. Carmack is many thing, engineering genius above them. However, he would frequently wade into areas where he had no experience, demand others do what he said, ignore evidence he was wrong, bully people, and disparage entire teams who were doing good, and in some cases legally required, work. When data proved his idea was wrong, he…
Yeah well, you're anonymous, so you might as well be someone with a huge ego who got their idea shut down by Carmack once and is still bitter about it. More often than not, when people think they "prove something wrong with data" it's more that they're "taking some data and interpret in a way that fits their standpoint".
Carmack has proven enough times in the past that he's able to deliver, that he can push technology, knows what's possible and what isn't, and can wrap up a product. "Wading into fields he has no experience in" sounds pretty unlikely for VR given his past work. And I wouldn't consider the Oculus Go a failure, more like ahead of it's time and released too early. A prototype of the quest. But I guess now it's easy to claim everything that's bad about the go was Carmack's work and everything good about the quest and quest 2 was someone else's.
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#486”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. This doesn't actually surprise me in the least bit, and that's not a criticism of either FB/Meta or Carmack. It's simply that after a couple of decades in industry, I now see that effective organizational leaders are exceedingly rare, and I've seen now many super-expe…
>I have plenty of examples across multiple top-tier companies, of senior leadership who were smart, thoughtful, effective... and still reasonable and compassionate.
some hide it well, some haven't met a cutthroat enough politician/executive. Some may be smart or lucky enough to completely avoid the scene altogether and tend to their own farm peacefully. And then maybe 2 remaining groups are truly in sync and altruistic and overall seem to be interested in the betterment of their audience than profits.
I wouldn't bet on Meta being in the latter category tho. I hope carmack enjoys his farm, he's definitely earned it.
>I think it's simply that it's tough to move people, plain as that.
can't make a horse drink. In this case, it's probably more like you can't even lead the horse to water to begin with.
That's why culture fit is such a strong factor in success. you can't spend all day fighting and expect reasonable progress to be made.
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#487Earlier quoted context omitted.
Throwaway because it could be easy to identify my position from my normal account name. Carmack is many thing, engineering genius above them. However, he would frequently wade into areas where he had no experience, demand others do what he said, ignore evidence he was wrong, bully people, and disparage entire teams who were doing good, and in some cases legally required, work. When data proved his idea was wrong, he…
HN is all about that cult of personality, we want to believe in heroic programmers (or founders) who singlehandedly change the world with their geinus clarity. Paul Graham said this, John Carmack said that and we lap it all up. It's been this way since the ancient times, and the stories of Hercules and Theseus. We mythologize these personalities, and in our mind they become demigods. But there's a reason the folk wis…
But there's a reason the folk wisdom tells you to never meet your heroes. When you do, you painfully realize that the stories didn't focus on their humanity but instead were spinning the myths of their divinity.
This is part of the reason I like Steve Jobs so much. The stories around him never failed to mention his legendary penchant for downright nasty behaviour. And yet people loved him anyway, even when they lived in fear of stepping into an elevator with him! It’s bizarre and entertaining stuff!
Personally I’d rather work with boring, reliable, friendly people in an low-stress job and focus my passion on my hobbies. I recognize that others might want to take risks and try to make something big.
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#488”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…
Throwaway because it could be easy to identify my position from my normal account name. Carmack is many thing, engineering genius above them. However, he would frequently wade into areas where he had no experience, demand others do what he said, ignore evidence he was wrong, bully people, and disparage entire teams who were doing good, and in some cases legally required, work. When data proved his idea was wrong, he…
Maybe Oculus Go was a failure in all those areas because VR will always be a failure in those areas.
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#489Earlier quoted context omitted.
I interpret this as strong circumstantial evidence that companies who start out as engineering centric and claims to be meritocratic eventually deteriorate into good ole nepotistic power play and a sea of bureaucracy. It’s quite entertaining to observe even John Carmack go through this very relatable frustration.
It's interesting how universal this pattern seems to be.
I don't want to sound rude nor elitist, but at the end of the day most workers don't care about the product the work on. They care about the prestige, or the money, or some other meta-factor (no pun intended) that comes with the role.
Even those that really resonate with a product they work on don't necessarily view said product as their dream calling or calling in life. Maybe the knowledge and ideas from the industry are useful but not necessarily what they are used for (for a topical exmaple: I'm sure meta has top VR engineers working on some of the most boring, least ambitious apps you can imagine).
If all that can happen at the non-1% level of society, I'm not surprised it happens amongst the wealthy elite, especially those whose job is to try and make the most money for the next quarter.
Re: John Carmack Leaves Meta
#490Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 r…
XMPP compatibility was amazing. I remember using one chat client to accept all the different chat services, including google one.