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The part about not giving a fuck is crucial. You don't get rewarded for preventing bad things.
Like with politics. Everyone notices leader visiting places after disaster while no-one can notice if one was prevented.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fudai,_Iwate
However to prove your point, years after his death.
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> trying to be convincing on technical issues when you can't understand fundamentals of English is not persuasive at all. Note to disprove your point but there are plenty of very technically capable people who learn English as a second, third, fourth language. In fact I would say in technical settings, such as here, that this is statistically more common than a native English speaker with poor writing skills.
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Never worked there, but from everything I have observed, the free lunches, full medical/dental/vision and high six figure salaries generally imbue people with a sense of well being. The nice offices and decent working hours also help. The trip is that Facebook also has some mission driven stuff about making the world a bit nicer that some people really buy into. It's a good mission too and a lot of people really do e…
> mission driven stuff about making the world a bit nicer That instantly becomes political because not everyone agrees on what "nicer" is.
”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…
"I have never been able to kill stupid things before they cause damage" One of the most important things an organization can have is a "no man". A project that I was involved in when I worked at Google was completed on time primarily because we had a very senior (DE level) engineer tangentially involved in the project. He was near the end of his career, and he just didn't give a f* about politics. He'd sit in design…
I’ve also seen morale being slowly killed by people who _thought_ they were doing this, but were _actually_ just argumentative defeatists. I don’t think Carmack - or the engineer you describe - is likely to be one of these - but anyone hoping to emulate them should be conscious of what they’re doing.
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For every example of smart, thoughtful, effective senior leadership there are 10 or 100 of the opposite sort. Most corporations are a living proof of Peter's principle, where senior management is a country club of old* people covering each other's incompetence. * It is not about ageism, but about people that are in their 5 years before retirement and have zero motivation to do any work, keep skills in shape or give a…
That honestly sounds like a lot of tech "gurus" too, like Mudge and Carmack. These people made a name for themselves with incredible skill as an IC (usually in a hot field, too), and never made the transition beyond that level, towards being leaders with the ability to grasp the full picture. There is a completely different set of skills involved. In fact, the best wide-area tech leads I met at Google were not great…
So, probably a very able leader of a small-ish team. Which is OK and can still lead to huge impact and I wish he'd stayed in that zone in anything he was doing (probably started that way at Occulus?).
Some of us can't acquire (or haven't acquired yet) the skillset and daily gumption of leading bigger orgs and I guess it's fine.
I hope his next endeavour gets him back to a manageable high-impact I-decide-most-things job. I just want to see what a happy and free Carmack can still do.
I think Carmack is a great engineer. Part of that is being great at communication. And he is! Usually. But this paragraph is quite hard to follow: > If I am trying to sway others, I would say that an org that has only known inefficiency is ill prepared for the inevitable competition and/or belt tightening, but really, it is the more personal pain of seeing a 5% GPU utilization number in production. I am offended by i…
Changing the source instead of adding an edit would make previous comments that were asking about the unclear part not make sense anymore. The 5% figure is kinda shocking, that’s why he put a number. And it’s I think why people appreciate him, because he gets specific instead if writing a vague statement like “pain of seeing an application waste resources”. I really don’t understand how it can be unclear that 5% is b…
But he is not specific. As you write the specific problem he has is with the efficiency of the organisation. He is not quitting Meta because someone shipped a build with 5% GPU utilisation. The gpu utilisation thing is an example and the number is pulled out of thin air. And as an example it doesn't do a good job. It confuses people instead of illuminating what he is trying to say.
> I really don’t understand how it can be unclear that 5% is bad.
Because it is not bad? I'm writing here this comment, and my browser is barely utilising a single percentage of my GPU. Should the browser's developers rewrite their code to burn more GPU? Obviously not.
But there is a bigger problem with the analogy. It tries to explain something quite simple (Carmack sees the organisation is inefficient. He has a dislike to inefficiency because his job is to make computers more efficient.) And to illustrate this simple concept he brings in the vocabulary of a specialist field. (performance optimisation, and graphics programming) Thus reducing the audience who can understand his point for no good reason whatsoever.
> The thing that was actually unclear was people not understanding it was analogy for organizational effectiveness.
Yes. And it is the direct result of his writing being confusing.
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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…
I don't work with John Carmack, but I had a meeting with him once. He is brilliant, no doubt, but he is exactly like every single engineer with no professional communications training. He struggles to make his points in everyday developer language, when he needs to speak more calculated, more measured, and with significantly more audience empathy. Just like 99% of us technologists. We're an industry of weak communica…
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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 technolog…
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