”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 think my influence at the margins has been positive, but it has never been a prime mover.”
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.
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 would say words to the effect of "I don't care, because I still believe I'm right from an ideological background". He would devalue people, there expertise, there experience, and there thoughts because "I'm John Carmack". Truthfully, I have never worked with someone before who was somehow so politely toxic to a workplace.
Carmacks work in VR was absolutely invaluable from a technical standpoint, but VR now is as successful as it is in spite of his influence, not because of it. When I hear people say "If only Meta would let Carmack do what he wants we'd see his ideal VR experience and it would be amazing". You already saw it. It was Oculus Go, and by every metric is was a commercial, financial, and technical, disaster.
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.
>who got their idea shut down by Carmack once and is still bitter about it
Nice fantasy you created there to support your argument. Have you heard of "don't shoot the messenger"?
I admire Carmack as much all other hackers around. I don't sympathize with many of Meta's practices. Still, it's entirely plausible that GP's experience holds truth.
I've been around the equivalent of people like Carmack in academia and all of them have their dash of arrogance and petulance, sometimes this leads them to take really bad decisions. Also, engineering skills and management skills are different things. And there's Peter's Principle as well, to which Carmack is not exempt either.
The person’s whole story was entirely based around their anonymous word. The follow up comment reads to me like a narrative way of pointing they out.
We don’t really know, I guess, what happened internally. But:
* Carmack has tossed some grenades as he left, so if there’s a real story there I guess we’re likely to hear about it from some non-anonymous sources soon enough if he was a real pain.
* He’s gone now, so we’ll see to what extent he was holding them back shortly.
I bet we hear nothing and they never release anything, but I won’t claim to have an uncle who works at ~~Nintendo~~ Facebook.
The story from Carmack is also based on his word. Unless you've worked with him directly, everything you know about John Carmack is based on some or other's words.
I'm not obsessed with Carmack, so I honestly don't know what has been said about him one way or the other. But really this is just a coat rack to hang a point about the epistemology of the argument.
>Yeah well, you're anonymous...Carmack has proven enough times in the past that he's able to deliver, that he can push technology
In a follow up agreeing with him
>The person’s whole story was entirely based around their anonymous word
And later still
>A word with a name behind it.
So what's being implicitly said here is "I judge what's true based on the authority of the source". The premise is John Carmack is an asshole, and the attempt to refute it is "I have it on good authority he isn't", and when you dig into that claim the authority is either Carmack himself or a tech news org article. Well, when you stop and think about it, tech news has no interest in learning or publicizing if he's an asshole.
Unless you worked with him, everything you know about Carmack is just something you read somewhere. But there is no root of the reputation tree. Reputation comes from nowhere. Its all just bits of text being trusted because they looks like other bits of text you previously trusted. Nothing ever grounds the Carmack story in something else you can observe. We have no way to test if we are in a PR manicured version of the truth or not. Claims about him are both unfalsifiable and inconsequential and reduce to insisting a preferred source of narrative is more reputable than the others.
As far as I know, he only exists as a concept which is written about in websites I frequent. I'm a John Carmack Truther. There is no John Carmack. The CIA made him up as part of MK Ultra II. I read it on a very reputable online forum.
>As far as I know, he only exists as a concept which is written about in websites I frequent. I'm a John Carmack Truther. There is no John Carmack. The CIA made him up as part of MK Ultra II. I read it on a very reputable online forum.
That's utterly ridiculous. John Carmack is real, but he's actually an alien from the planet Ka'vi. I know this is true because I read it on an actually reputable online forum (unlike your "reputable" forum). I know my preferred forum is reputable because its other postings agree with my opinions.
> The story from Carmack is also based on his word. Unless you've worked with him directly, everything you know about John Carmack is based on some or other's words.
As an admirer I saw a few videos of Carmack and immediately pegged him as NPD, obviously so. GGGP's post supports my observations, re: bully, disparaging, can't admit when he's wrong, can't acknowledge the accomplishments of others, all of which predicts what we don't see, deep anxieties, extreme self-criticism, long-held grudges, envy, etc. And I respect Carmack for leaving Meta, but its hard to ignore that he joined in the first place when Meta already has a CEN (Chief Executive Narcissist).
I think the point was that any large enough company will have a ton of politics related to decisions around technology, so one person's anonymous perspective shouldn't carry much/any weight.
Academic experience writing papers vs actual industry experience to the point of creating new technologies and new markets almost by himself are definitely not equivalent.
So, as much as I would be a bit judgemental about academics opinions, I would definitely listen to Carmack.
Academia can mean a lot of things, some of which have obvious parallels to industry. He may deserve a pedestal in some respects, and I'd listen to him too, but it should be tempered.
Everyone can and will make really bad decisions, but in my experience, owning up to mistakes and taking responsibility in contrast to playing it down and being history revisionists, is inversely proportional to, well, how clever they consider themselves be. The "well that was intentional/expected/irrelevant since it was really X instead of Y we did" is a bit worn by now. Painting broadly, generalizing etc of course.
The principple "Don't shoot the messenger" applies to real-life messengers.
It does not apply to anonymous 'messengers' on the Internet who spread stories that can't be verified, and who themselves are of unknown credibility/origins, and who could have undisclosed biases/prejudices against the person they are criticizing.
At risk of upsetting this thread’s balance and reducing it to negativity: I prefer your parent comment’s interpretation of the Go. “Ahead of its time”? Technology is the last space where a newfangled product would lose momentum by being released to early.
I’m open to being proved ignorant here. Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted?
Subscription music services like Rhapsody provided what Apple Music does now 15 years ago, and they died out (similarly Microsoft’s Zune service). Maybe this is what you’re saying? - All the same, I would trump these examples up to poor marketing, management, and product specifics. Apple Music isn’t releasing their service at a better time. They just put a lot more effort into it, and it provides the service better. (Their phone ecosystem plays a big part in this.) This example could be extended into saying that the Go just wasn’t good enough (thus: Carmack failed).
FWIW: I’m a Carmack fan, and I base a lot of how I use Emacs on his wisdom accumulated over the years. For example, his recent shift to VSCode has inspired me to think in that direction.
> Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted?
Uh yeah, VR itself as a concept and models of VR have been live since the 80s but were especially hyped in the 90s but never went anywhere beyond amusement parks and arcades. And no one wanted to touch VR in the 00s despite huge leaps in processing power.
I would even argue the original Macintosh was ahead of its time, maybe because it was too expensive and too hard to upgrade. As a result, DOS and Windows and IBM clones took the PC market, despite coming later and initially being inferior.
I enjoy this as a friendly/elucidating discussion and don’t want to annoy or antagonize you (just don’t respond if I do).
I do appreciate your take on the original Macintosh.
VR has never been ahead of its time in that it’s never had a time. It still hasn’t made its way into any sort of popular acceptance. The gaming industry is the only space in which it has made significant strides. If VR circles back around to popular acceptance of something like Carmack’s vision (like the Mac has done with Job’s) your point will be valid.
As it stands, Carmack’s vision failed, and Meta continues to experiment and R&D with different directions. Carmack’s decision to leave more closely aligns with the ideas expressed in the comment that started this IMO.
I’m literally invested in Meta’s endeavors here. (FMET through Fidelity Investments.) The previous sentence is just communicating my bias that I think they have the right idea in the long run.
Carmack's vision culminated in Quest 2, which is the only hardware Meta has produced that any significant number of people care about.
Instead of Macintosh, I might point at Commodore. Affordable hardware with success in some niches like video production, but poor broader acceptance beyond gaming markets. Weirdly out of touch management with a yearning to be accepted by stuffy business types, but completely misjudging wants and needs. With Quest Pro I get vibes of the Commodore 128, a game machine trying and failing to be a Serious Business Device.
Tbh if oculus weren’t associated with Facebook in a meaningful way I’d be all over it. But it is so I avoid it. The technology works fine but is a commercial failure, that’s not wholly Carmack’s fault.
Yea it is a device that goes on your face, puts cameras in your room, and creates a pseudo-reality for you. Who in their right mind would trust Facebook with that?
While I completely agree with you. I think it’s important to point out that if it wasn’t sold by Facebook, it would be 2.5x the cost and then most people wouldn’t touch it as it would be too big of an investment.
I think, in terms of the hype, VR was going to be the next big thing in gaming, and then maybe not just gaming after that, but other applications. So I was expecting it to become a required peripheral like a headset or a good mouse & keyboard.
But I don’t feel like I’ve missed anything by not having a VR headset. Like the product direction was very clear for oculus, had lots of buy in from devs… then it was bought by Facebook and became so much muddier. (“We’re going to use it in the meta-verse for boring work stuff” VR will be everything).
You need an exciting killer app for these things and they need to be commodity hardware. I’m guessing the best thing anyone could do for VR is give up all their patents.
It is probably helpful to define 'commercial failure'. In the sense that it sold a lot of units, it is a success; in the sense that it made any money for the company which produced it, it is a failure. So, it could be taken different ways depending on how the term is defined.
Between Oculus, Vive, and other various competitors, VR has been successful in many ways that it wasn't able to achieve 20 years ago. If you set the bar so high that it needs to be as successful as the personal computer or the mobile phone, sure. But I wouldn't call Oculus or modern VR a failure. It's a niche success.
>I would even argue the original Macintosh was ahead of its time
You can argue about the Mac but certainly the Lisa was. Early laptops like the Data General/One as well (although in that case there business issues as well).
As for streaming music, to go mainstream it probably needed cheap enough and fast enough cellular service. Of course, ripped, purchased, and umm acquired local copies of music also had a place once cheap enough portable devices with sufficient storage were available.
The company I worked for, had a Xerox system. It looked like an 860, but may have actually been more modern.
Now that was ahead of its time.
We also had Osborne and Kaypro computers, but the 860 was arguably the inspiration for the Mac. The operating system presented a mouse (actually, I think it was a touchpad)-driven, icon-based GUI. I remember seeing the “trash can,” on the bottom right (I think). I also seem to remember folder icons.
But that was from a brief, 5-minute (or less) peek, 40 years ago.
They didn’t let us mensch engineers near the thing.
>Old school hackers, military generals, special forces paratroopers, and space shuttle astronauts who are sensitive to social status use a GRiD Compass.
>Development began in 1979, and the main buyer was the U.S. government. NASA used it on the Space Shuttle during the early 1980s, as it was powerful, lightweight, and compact. The military Special Forces also purchased the machine, as it could be used by paratroopers in combat.
>Along with the Gavilan SC and Sharp PC-5000 released the following year, the GRiD Compass established much of the basic design of subsequent laptop computers, although the laptop concept itself owed much to the Dynabook project developed at Xerox PARC from the late 1960s. The Compass company subsequently earned significant returns on its patent rights as its innovations became commonplace.
I asked Glenn Edens, who co-founded GRiD, about a story I heard about the GRiD a long time ago, and here's the discussion:
>Not a solution for people who are sensitive to social status.
>Old school hackers, military generals, special forces paratroopers, and space shuttle astronauts who are sensitive to social status use a GRiD Compass. [...] I can't find a citation and don't know if it's true, but decades ago I heard a rumor that a Mossad agent's magnesium alloy GRiD stopped a bullet! Try that with a MacBook Air.
>Man in a Briefcase: The Social Construction of the Laptop Computer and the Emergence of a Type Form
>Abstract
>Dominant design discourse of the late 1970s and early 1980s presented the introduction of the laptop computer as the result of 'inevitable' progress in a variety of disparate technologies, pulled together to create an unprecedented, revolutionary technological product. While the laptop was a revolutionary product, such a narrative works to dismiss a series of products which predated the laptop but which had much the same aim, and to deny a social drive for such products, which had been in evidence for a number of years before the technology to achieve them was available. This article shows that the social drive for the development of portable computing came in part from the 'macho mystique' of concealed technology that was a substantial motif in popular culture at that time. Using corporate promotional material from the National Archive for the History of Computing at the University of Manchester, and interviews with some of the designers and engineers involved in the creation of early portable computers, this work explores the development of the first real laptop computer, the 'GRiD Compass', in the context of its contemporaries. The consequent trajectory of laptop computer design is then traced to show how it has become a product which has a mixture of associated meanings to a wide range of consumers. In this way, the work explores the role of consumption in the development of digital technology.
>[translated:] The Grid Compass was made of black lacquered magnesium alloy.
>Among its most remembered features, there is the fact that the paint went away after a while, due to the weight and dimensions that did not allow it to be too delicate with its transport. And so the dull black splintered, revealing the shiny metal beneath.
>Grid Compass - Bill Moggridge Design
>The Grid Compass was a status symbol, the flag of that tribe of people who wanted to show the world that they can never really disconnect from work.
>Owning it was cool.
>But even cooler was having chipped it, because it was the unmistakable sign that one not only possessed that thing, but actually used it.
The GRiD was so well built, and they were so popular with the military, that rumor was totally believable.
This has some stories about spooky GRiD users, like Admiral John Poindexter, who was a bit of a hacker:
>Pioneering the Laptop: Engineering the GRiD compass
>Introduced in 1982, the GRiD Compass 1100 was likely the first commercial computer created in a laptop format and one of the first truly portable machines. With its rugged magnesium clamshell case (the screen folds flat over the keyboard), switching power supply, electro-luminescent display, non-volatile bubble memory, and built-in modem, the hardware design incorporated many features that we take for granted today. Software innovations included a graphical operating system, an integrated productivity suite including word processor, spreadsheet, graphics and e-mail. GRiD Systems Corporation, founded in 1979 by John Ellenby and his co-founders Glenn Edens and David Paulsen, pioneered many portable devices including the laptop, pen-based and tablet PC form factors.
>Key members of the original GRiD engineering team -- Glenn Edens, Carol Hankins, Craig Mathias and Dave Paulsen -- share engineering stories from the Wild West of the laptop computer. Moderated by New York Times journalist John Markoff.
(At 32:37 they mention an external 5 1/4" floppy disk peripheral that was returned for service with a bullet hole, and the "Scrubbing Bubbles" software they wrote for the government to erase the bubble memory in case of emergency.)
Glenn Edens sent the following messages at 11:16 PM
Hello Don, I know that rumor, I can neither confirm nor deny :)
We got a lot of returned gear with bullet holes or shrapnel damage of odd kinds.
I doubt GRiD's use had anything to do with social status though - it was more about it was the first laptop, it was rugged (we over-engineered the heck out of it), it had an amazing software development environment (you could actually write SW for it on it beyond BASIC), usually folks rag on the price, however if you fully configured any other computer of the day the price was not all that different - plus no one paid retail in those days, thats what everyone forgets :)
I love all the references you found!
I'll also add that it is a myth that the military and Government were our biggest customers, they were about 25%, our biggest early customers were banks, audit firms, engineering firms, oil exploration, etc.
The first machine went to Steve Jobs (he paid for it, it was a bet he and I made), the second machine went to William F. Buckley (he paid for it as well). The one thing I regret is that we didn't release the Smalltalk system we did for it (getting a mouse was not easy in 1982, the only producer at that time was Tat Lam and all his production went to Xerox (Star prototypes as I remember). A funny story that for Apple to get a mouse prototype for the Lisa I had to go "appropriate" one from Xerox PARC - with tacit permission, everyone forgets Xerox was an investor in Apple (Trip Hawkins kindly tells that story from time to time).
So how are you doing?
Larry Ellison was an early buyer as well to use for a sailing race computer - I was told it replaced a DEC minicomputer that was being used onboard, saving a lot of weight and power draw :)
I can add it wasn't Mossad that I know of, it was closer to home, although I think we may have discussed that long ago - it was a US Agency :).
Don wrote:
So I’m reading between the lines that it DID stop a bullet, but it was somebody in the US, not the Mossad. Is that why Reagan survived his assassination attempt??! ;)
I still believe the social status was more like the unintended effect, not the primary cause, of people owning a GRiD, because they certainly were bad-assed computers.
Maybe MythBusters cold do an experiment to find out if a GRiD will stop a bullet. Hopefully not a working one though, those should be treated with care and respect and not shot at.
Wow it would have been amazing to run Smalltalk on that thing. As it was so inspired by the Dynabook, did Alan Kay ever get to play with one?
Glenn replied:
That’s the story. I never heard it had anything to do with Reagan though. Over the years we did get multiple units with all sorts of crazy damage, much of it was repairable, some was not.
Well we certainly did nothing to counter the image, although I think that really came later. In that time (we started shipping in 1982) even having a computer was a big deal no matter if it were an Osbourne or a GRiD. Although the Compaq’s et. al. sewing machine sized computers shipped well into the late 80’s. We really didn’t any serious competition until 88’ or 89’, so nearly five years after we started shipping. For the first 3 years we were always catching up to the backlog.
Indeed :). We definitely found ‘debris' inside the machines that were returned to see if they could be repaired, obviously it would have to do with what size bullet and angle of incidence.
The Dynabook was the inspiration for sure. Yes, Alan Kay played with several GRiD models as did Dan Ingalls. The Smalltalk implementation was on the GRiD was pretty good for the day, the 8086 being a real 16-bit machine made a difference. The Alto II was still a bit faster, but not by much. If a mouse were readily commercially available we would have shipped it. It was a little hard to use on the small screen so you wound up moving windows often.
Were the GRiD laptops, which I remember reading about in Byte Magazine back in the day, waterproof? I believe decades of experience with portable computers suggest that might be a more important feature than being able to stop a bullet. Depending on what kind of company one is keeping.
I've been revisiting it lately, and Byte actually contains a vast collection of things that didn't make it largely because they were ahead of their time. Great stuff.
Expensive and hard to upgrade are both separate from being ahead of your time design-wise. (Apple had healthy margins on Macintosh from the start, and the 128k no-slots aspects were both argued against by people on the team. I guess there's a sense of "ahead of its time" that fits, where Jobs consistently aimed for more "upscale consumer" type products but wasn't yet able to make that work for a big market.)
I've always thought that TiVo was way ahead of its time. The company is still alive but it feels weird to talk about it in present tense when we've got Roku, Chromecast, Firestick, and Apple TV. Even the era of cable provider DVRs made me feel like TiVo was ahead of its time!
Tivo nailed the user experience which is why it took off. In the early years, the response time on the interface was nearly instant for everything. This made it delightful to use because it felt like an extension of your intentions. Today, even with all the content in the world available, there are far more delays and wait times because the content is streaming and not local. Even YouTube TV, which could have the same 10ms response time as Stadia, is slow in many places.
The idea of the actual device seems very tied to a particular time, not ahead of it. The point was to record broadcast TV (so, reliant on the time when broadcast TV was the main way of getting TV) and the ability to skip ads (nowadays any streaming service worth watching doesn’t have ads anyway).
footnote:
The TiVo UX was superb but, for my money, ReplayTV was superior, technically.
And, worth mentioning, its UX was not lacking in any perceivable way; OK, maybe less flair & eye candy than TiVo, but also really, really good in its discoverability & daily usability.
Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted
Mobile devices with clunky resistive touchscreens come to mind. The iPhone was hardly the first "smartphone," but Jobs's key insight was to have people sitting by the river waiting for decent touchscreen technology to come floating by. When capacitive multitouch happened, it was a classic example of apparent "good luck" being equal to "preparation meets opportunity." Musk is obviously
trying to camp the same spawning grounds with Neuralink.
Teletext might be another example, as the predecessor to the WWW. Putting a lot of money into advancing Teletext development would have resulted in WebTV at best, and more likely just an expensive waste of time.
Any of dozens of personal computer models in the 1980s, some quite advanced, that weren't made by Apple or IBM.
Navigation and infotainment in cars -- Buick's early CRT touchscreen and Honda's "electric gyrocator" for navigation come to mind. There was no point trying to do either of those things at the time.
Minidisc as an early embodiment of advanced DSP techniques for lossy audio compression. ATRAC could have been MP3 but wasn't, because Sony.
Analog laserdiscs as a home video format. It was the right basic idea, and boasted some exotic technology under the hood -- but disc-based A/V needed to wait for digital techniques before it really made sense.
Not hard to come up with examples that answer this question, for sure.
>Analog laserdiscs as a home video format. It was the right basic idea, and boasted some exotic technology under the hood -- but disc-based A/V needed to wait for digital techniques before it really made sense.
I'm not it really needed to; analog laserdiscs were a huge improvement over existing videotapes, at least for distribution of movies (not for recording obviously). The main problem was the price: they were expensive as hell. Not sure if that was due to technical limitations, or the players pricing it high because it was a "premium" format and they priced themselves into irrelevance and obscurity. I've seen this with many other technologies over the years: someone introduces something really cool, but it's so damn expensive no one buys it, so it goes nowhere, and eventually some cheaper alternative comes along and becomes the new standard.
Stadia is a great example. I am still using it today before the shut down, it's amazing how it's actually got me into playing games again and it's fantastic for casual games with friends since everyone can play no matter there hardware and the multiplayer features are fantastic for this.
It works and it is fantastic, but it's ahead of it's time and most people don't know what it is. That and Google's mismanagement of the service, but if it was an accepted thing, Google wouldn't have had to push it ahead so much, but since it wasn't they did and they failed.
I don't know if we really pin the blame on that for stadia. Maybe portions, but I also suspect that a big reason for stadia's "failure" wasn't necessarily Google's/Stadia's fault. Lots of homes still have really bad internet connections. I tried stadia, I think the concept is great and most everything is there except I can't get a decent enough internet connection from any ISP in my area to make it usable at home. But I know people is places with really good internet connections and have heard nothing but good things about it before I tried.
As someone that had stadia and a good enough connection for it, the technology was honestly really impressive.
The problem for me was that it was yet another platform. I already have many games I'd like to keep playing, I don't want to buy another copy that can only be used on stadia. I don't want to buy anything on stadia and then only be able to stream it while I still have a gaming pc.
For sure I definitely see that, but I think Stadia solves a different problem. If you are already heavily invested in something like Steam and have the hardware, Stadia doesn't really solve your problem. If you don't have the hardware, maybe the computer you can afford is a $200 netbook, or you can't travel with your gaming PC, but can pay the monthly fee and occasionally the cost of a game, then Stadia could solve the problem, barring a good enough internet connection. Which when I tried it was my case. I didn't have a gaming PC, I just bought an M1 Macbook Air, so didn't really wanna dish out more money for hardware, Stadia could have allowed me to game on my M1, but once again, bad internet connection. How I play locally and have games on Steam since my job provided me with a home gaming PC and they don't care what I do with it so long as I can work from home with it (no company spyware).
But yea, if you have the hardware already, the value add wasn't really there. But for the broke college student, or broke adult who can't justify dropping hundreds/thousands today but can eat a few bucks a month. Or someone who travels often for personal or work, then the value add is there.
> Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted?
Smartphones. Microsoft and Symbian were at least 7 years ahead of Apple. The manner in which they squandered the opportunity aside, most people simply didn't care about having email on their phone.
Most people still don't care about having email on their phone: that's not what they use their phone for most of the time. They use it for text chats, taking photos, playing games, navigating, etc. I'd say email ranks pretty low in importance.
Those other companies failed because they had clunky UIs and thought that most people really cared about typing emails on their phones; they didn't. Apple finally proved that people want something easy to use that does things they want to do (which isn't email).
> Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted?
Well I think we might have different ideas of what "ahead of its time" exactly is. I would include - and I think I hinted at that with "released too early" - things that simply weren't refined enough technically, as well as things that relied on other technology that simply wasn't capable, widespread or accepted enough at their time.
So regarding Rhapsody for example, it was released in 2001, a time where the majority of people was still on dial up iirc, and even if you were one of the lucky ones with a DSL connection, you might've had a metered connection, so music streaming was just... ahead of it's time.
The Go was certainly not "ahead of it's time". It was a standalone version of the GearVR, which was released three years earlier. At the same time Oculus released the Go with 3DOF tracking, Google released the Lenovo Mirage Solo with 6DOF tracking.
That said, there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the Go. It was and still is, the cheapest entry point into VR. The lack of features made it much more lightweight and comfortable than its successors, which also cost double of the Go.
The only real problem with the Go is that Facebook didn't continue that line of product. There is plenty of room for a 3DOF/2D content focused headset, but Facebook never really cared about that area of VR.
Even if the statement were true, it’s not like they hired some anonymous guy, they knew what they were getting. Don’t hire a passionate guy like that if you don’t want him to concern himself with your company.
>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.
In the finance world, lesson number 1 is past performance is not a predictor of future results.
I don't care how much of a virtuoso you are, if you clash with culture, you're fucked. I'm just coming out of a similar stint where the best I could do was hold off a predilection toward toxic culture norms long enough for processes to materialize. To support the business in spite of it.
So I know exactly the kind of forces he was probably working against. It's rather thankless, draining, and exhausting in a way sleep doesn't help with.
It's often bidirectional as well, so there's a trick to figuring out when it's time to bounce.
Read the John Romero stuff. Even Carmack explains in the Lex Friedman interview how badly Carmack treated him. Carmack also presents enough in that interview to expect this take us quite likely correct.
Especially considering that there are two (unrelated) Carmacks: John and Adrian, both cofounders of id software. As for John Romero, he did a lot of "stuff".
How is it confusing? The way Carmack treated Romero is famous, and the recent Lex Fridman interview of Carmack even has it admitted by Carmack. Carmack, in the same interview, explains how he is an asshole to people that work(ed) with him at Meta.
Listen to the interview, and see if Carmack sounds like a reasonable boos, able to get the best from his staff, or sounds like someone that would cause serious friction. I'd pick the latter, from his own description of how he treats people.
He's a good programmer. He'd be absolutely terrible to work with or for.
Past experiences do not mean future success. This isn't even about Carmack: past 'heroes' end up failing in their decision-making in the future many times, and they were followed for no other reason than 'they have a track record'.
Past experience is not a perfect predictor, but still much better than almost anything else. I'm pretty sure you'd feel safer going into an operations if the surgeon said "I've done this 100 times now" instead of "This is my first time with this procedure".
Of course, it matters if the experience is directly relevant, and that's where hero worshiping often gets it wrong.
Let's say we have 2 people in two different walks of life. Jim and Alice.
Both of them are entrepreneurs and like doing startups. Both of their goals are to take a startup from idea to $1 Billion+ IPO in 2 years and exit and then start the next start-up. If they don't reach 1 Billion IPO they just exit.
After 20 years. Jim and Alice have both attempted 10 startups.
Jim has reached the goal 2 out of 10 times. While Alice has reached the goal 8 out of 10 times.
Would it be a fallacy to bet on Alice if you had to invest in either Jim or Alice's startup?
That is an indication of why the particulars are important, but not defining what makes the argument fallacious. For instance 'ad hominem' is a fallacy because attacking a person making an argument doesn't make the argument incorrect. Relying on past behavior to indicate future success is also what you just did, but you were more specific about the inputs.
I think its hard to prove without a very large statistical data set as we see that 8 out 10 times might IPO but in the next 50 years (if that would be possible) it might be 0 out of the next 10.
IMO the reason is that things change. People change. Markets change. The world just doesn't stay static. But our tendency is indeed to trust people who did something and I would probably also trust a person more given certain specifics as above.
I say this as someone who cares about language, and who has no dog in this Carmack dispute.
I think you are overweighting a fairly simple grammatical error. The commenter expresses themself clearly and logically. It is possible that they don't speak English as a first language, or that they simply are not that careful about making grammatical mistakes. Not everyone is as pedantic about language as you or I may be.
Unreasonable people can write grammatically, and reasonable people can write ungrammatically. I think it is better to judge an argument by its reasonableness.
I think many people would consider your response impolite and unkind to the original poster. Surely you do not want to shame someone for their lack of mastery with the English language? Surely you would rather judge an argument on its merits?
May I suggest a last question: could you see yourself reading this comment to the original poster face-to-face? Does it not seem rude and condescending to imagine yourself doing that?
> It is possible that they don't speak English as a first language
This is more of a fun side note: It's more likely that they're a native speaker. People who learn English as a second language generally don't make the their/there mix up.
Other keyboards are seriously annoying by either not having prediction, putting them behind late T9s or they have predictions which seems to be made by someone who almost actively try to make me look stupid.
English is the only language I know and my international friends take great pleasure in correcting my grammatical errors. I've learned a great deal about my mother tongue from them!
I observed that too on myself (English is my second language), and I even wrote comments like that in the past, but after 20 years I noticed that I started making those errors myself, which sucks.
I'm guessing when you read people making this mistake over and over (I even saw it done in news articles) I guess your brain starts equating them together :(
I'm thankful for those people correcting it, although I think it is a losing battle.
That is a fun side note :) Do you have a source for this? I'd love to read more about it. I assume it's because when you're actually taught this specifically, you remember it, as opposed to native speakers who "learn" the spelling via osmosis or something.
Native speakers learn the language at a time when they can't read or write, so they have to rely on their listening. Non-native speakers on the other hand usually first see the language written down, and then hear / pronounce it, and connect the writing with what they hear.
If I had a penny for every time a native speaker wrote "would of" instead of "would have" in forums, I'd be a billionaire. "Their" / "They're" / "There" is also common.
But the funny thing is, I noticed I would make similar errors after being immersed in a native environment after a few years time. Somehow I just say to myself what I wanted to write, and the slip-up happens. So native speakers are more prone to this, but it's not only there privilege!
I observed it on myself, although after some time I started doing it too.
My belief was that it's because English is not spelled the same way it sounds, so people who learn it are forced to memorize pronunciation and writing separately.
Going to reply on this comment since it's a thorough response to mine.
Look; I'm seeing a lot of reasoning across comments from non-native language, keyboard input, autocorrect, and so forth.
None of this changes the fact that the usage is just flat out wrong. Have we become so soft in society that nothing can be pointed out because of speculative reasons?
If it's a 2nd language, learn the language. If it's the keyboard, get a better keyboard. If it's autocorrect, double check what you write. Stop making excuses for everything.
All these cries for why we should accept there/ their/ they're uncontested is no doubt a reflection of the frustration Carmack must have experienced, if HN is any indicator of the FAANG workforce. John is known to be very direct and unapologetic himself, and here y'all are losing your mind on a slight criticism. It's no wonder.
I would suggest that it's not necessary to speculate too much about why they made a grammatical error. There are many possible reasons. For instance, I suggested that they may simply be less pedantic/careful about grammar. They may simply care about the form of their expression less than you or I do.
I think judging a hypothesis by its form/expression is not a great way to get at the truth. If a heuristic has to be used, then probably tone, coherence, and even-handedness are better than grammatical correctness. Those are at least closer to the substance of the argument.
I suggest that evaluating arguments on the basis of form/expression will not help you get at the truth.
It is your choice whether to be aesthetically dissatisfied by grammatically incorrect English. Many would consider that pedantic, though I might have a modicum of sympathy for you. However, I think the error you've made is to promote aesthetic displeasure into distrust for the OP's reasonableness.
I do not know about others, but I do not think I am losing my mind about anything. I suspect that most direct and unapologetic people have faith in the substance of their arguments, and would be frustrated to be judged using low-signal heuristics like grammatical correctness.
I only add that the post above invokes some wildly spurious logic in counting the 5 instances of the same mistake as if they were 5 different mistakes. Such a basic error really makes me question his general reasoning ability.
What a fatuous argument. Have you considered that they may have used speech to text to dictate there (sic.) response from a mobile device, or that perhaps their (sic.) not a native speaker?
I find that the people who are overly concerned about semantics tend to be the people who have the least to offer in terms of substance. The idea that you can draw a correlation between one's technological aptitude and the inability to distinguish between various possessive adjectives is patently absurd.
Here's a pithy quote I created just for you: "it doesn't matter how many languages you can speak if you have nothing to say."
or just be dyslexic or any other myriad of disorders like ADHD etc that may affect such minor grammatical rules yet not change or alter the likelihood that they could be a senior meta engineer?
> 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.
There is/are and their sound very different in other languages, so I would say that people who speak English as a second language generally make these types of mistakes less often than natural speakers who learned speaking English many years before writing. (We make other types of mistakes more often though).
As a non-native Enlish speaker I'd like an n=1 'experience' to your n=1 'would say': the English is in my head first and then in writing. So at the time of writing there and their already sound alike and van be easily mixed up
This is true, but I (and you) learned to say and read/write these words at the same time, so we have an advantage over native English speakers in differentiating them.
At the same time the poster had a larger vocabulary than I have (which is true for native speakers generally, as I try to stay within simple English).
Likely. I can't find it now, but there was an HN story not long ago where someone used fairly rudimentary techniques to identify former/alt HN accounts based on stylometric similarity. It worked VERY well.
If I were going to post from a throwaway account for some reason, I would probably launder it through an intermediate language on Google Translate for one or two cycles. Otherwise, if I didn't bother with that, I'd certainly scatter some intentional errors here and there that I don't usually make.
Nowadays people would probably just use GPT prompts and rephrase to obscure identity. Good luck reversing the output to deduce the style of the author's original input.
I am quite confident that Satoshi Nakomoto was an Australian bloke(s) living in Japan when he/they/their wrote the Bitcoin Whitepaper. The code itself does suggest it was one person, but I still think it was a few people with one at the helm.
If you're typing quickly, you can miss when autocorrect puts in the wrong replacement
I stopped caring about when people have incorrect your vs you're and there vs their because it's really about whether the autocorrect ai is getting them right. English is an evolving language that I don't think will keep those distinctions in the future
It’s not a fundamental of English, because it’s (that’s another example) impossible to hear. You’re (that’s another example) being pedantic about an artifact of our writing system, which is strictly not language. I’m being pedantic about this because i’m tired of this being pointed out.
Grammatical mistakes aren’t a means to disprove anything. Not everyone is detail oriented and I doubt it prevented anyone from understanding the meaning of what they were saying. Their post wasn’t even technical, more like a stream of thought
someone writing and wishing to hide their identity may very well be masking their writing style. The bad grammar here might be the social media equivalent of using letters cut from magazines.
Their use of 'there' instead of 'their' could've been done purposely as a means of not being unmasked. A tool was posted the other week that took HN usernames and found accounts that it deemed as being alt accounts/similar writing styles.
Could be an attempt to throw something like that off
> specially anyone who doesn't know the difference between 'their' and 'there'
This is a really ablest take and should not really be seen here on HN. You have no idea what kind of an input device the author is using, if they have some handicap or disability nor even what their native language is. There are plenty of reasons a poster can make this mistake, and even more reasons to make it consistently. Please do better.
I worked with someone who was a bona fide development genius about 10 years ago and he was a CTO and co-founder at the time and considered himself to be able to input into any conversation with people who were domain experts in fields that he wasn't.
I remember him overruling the Head of Design and enforcing Arial to be the typeface used for the corporate brand because it was the typeface was present on more computers than any other in the world. Suffice to say the original typeface was much better.
Self doubt is a really really important trait to have as a leader - don't automatically assume you're right outside of your area of expertise and that team members can come up with good solutions that aren't yours is the only way you can ever really scale.
The CTO ultimately was forced out and became a specialist consultant and that probably suited him.
What’s wrong with Arial? I mean I know it is disliked by typography fans because it is a ripoff of the popular Helvetica. But like, moral concerns aside or whatever, as a slightly worse ripoff of a good and popular typeface, it is unsurprisingly fairly visually appealing…
It seems like a reasonable product decision given that most people don’t care about typeface history.
I find Arial slightly discomforting, because the kerning is not as nice as with Helvetica. Helvetica feels "denser".
But more to the point, for a corporate logo, Arial feels like a cheap knock off to the more polished Helvetica. You can see this yourself, by looking at corporate existing corporate logos designed in helvetica and then redesigned in Arial.
Admittedly this is personal preference in the end, but I feel like if HR is going to give someone bad news, they're going to do it in Arial. If Apple is going to release a life changing technology, they're going to do it in Helvetica.
I should have thought more about the experiment. I was trying to identify the helvetica ones, looking for example for logos that looked slightly unusual or janky.
I guess it would fit your point a little more if I just looked for whichever I thought was more aesthetically pleasing.
Anyway, I got about 50% (accidentally closed the window, I think it may have been 51%?) so at least if I was the customer, the company would not seem to gain any advantage from licensing the superior font.
It looks "fuller", "denser" to me. And leaves me with an impression of a "sturdy" company.
Finally, here's Neue Helvetica 75 and Arial Pro Bold pages from Linotype. I just open them up in a new tab each and switch tabs to get a better idea for things.
It's just really weird to me that people are all shocked-Pikachu about Carmack wanting to be the auteur in this scenario and to wield Meta's effectively-infinite resources in the exact ways that he wanted. It's apparent from every interview and article about him that this is how he operates. It seems to have worked well for him in the past, but it was obviously going to be a major culture clash at Meta unless they gave in and let him run the thing.
He was likely to have more success at Meta than his AGI startup. When it comes to intelligence and cognition no one even knows where to begin. The same for studying the brain. And the neural networks in the brain don't resemble anything like the neural networks in current AI.
I guess there's this idea that we'll wander into the right territory. That might work for other things but probably not for the most complicated organism on our planet.
Are those papers breakthroughs in understanding human cognition? It feels like there must be some philosophical underpinning to creating human-like intelligence.
I suppose there are two approaches: 1) understand the brain in all its complexity 2) wander upon something that seems like human cognition but isn’t (i.e. GPT)
Carmack and everyone else is taking the latter approach. Carmack may end up building something that seems intelligent — if that’s what you mean by intelligence.
Consider Chomsky’s view on current AI. He may disagree with me but he certainly disagrees with the idea that actual intelligence or something like AGI will result from current efforts.
> It feels like there must be some philosophical underpinning to creating human-like intelligence
Cognitive science, mostly stemming from this common intuition, has failed us after spending decades of research effort, while minting more than a few academic careers.
Same with many once prominent public intellectuals.
GPT is certainly presenting itself to be very uncharismatic to most and humiliating to some.
Honestly no one really cares about VR that’s the problem.
It’s cool in concept but whose going to shell out cash to be tethered to a machine wearing goggles sitting in a chair?
AR has potential but even that is marginally better than alternative solutions.
Also, I don’t know about y’all but I don’t trust Facebook so I don’t trust Meta. They are a data-leach.
We still probably have a decade or more to go with this technology it has to be affordable, lightweight, AR glasses not tied to a company that sells peoples data!
Honestly no one really cares about VR that’s the problem.
I feel like this is definitely the elephant in the room everybody is ignoring. Almost nobody gives a hoot about VR!
I'm a software engineer with a lot of (surprise, surprise) nerdy/geeky/whatever friends and interest in VR is close to zero. A few friends vouched for various games like Half-Life:Alyx and Beat Saber, but nobody was claiming it was a life altering experience and nobody is clamoring to live more of their lives in VR. VR definitely makes a great game controller for some kinds of games and there are even a few killer apps, but I mean like... Wii Sports was a "killer app" for motion controls and that doesn't mean it was a technology that shaped our lives in the long run.
And needless to say non-technical folks have less than zero interest in strapping a computer to their head and face.
God bless John Carmack, but it feels like he and FB are arguing about execution issues on a product nobody cared about in the first place.
I don't know about your friends, but playing Alyx opened my eyes to the level of immersion VR can achieve. It's a kind of gameplay that can't be repeated with 2d screens. I really do think it could be revolutionary, based on playing that game alone. If you can get ahold of a headset and a powerful gaming PC - I recommend giving it a try.
The problems right now are very fundamental. The quest 2 out of the box is supremely uncomfortable. Casual users will put it on and not want to use it due to VR nausea and the discomfort of the headset after wearing it for 20 minutes. The hardware is not powerful enough to create an experience like Alyx - all the headset games just have basic polygons and colors. Resolution is still poor, FOV is poor. We're still in the infancy of immersion/comfort/usability. I played Alyx on the Quest 1 which I actually think had better immersion due to the OLED screens.
IMO the trick is going to be whether Meta can pull off a usable, immersive device in the next 5 years without their revenues completely tanking. The problems to overcome are really hard and still at basic research level which takes years to develop. The other issue is the killer game or app that gets people into VR en-masse.
I guess my point is I think writing VR off completely is a mistake - like someone saying what is the point of a cell phone in the 1980s when they were giant bricks and cost a fortune. VR will get good enough at some point that it's like putting on a pair of glasses and stepping into another world without any friction. It's just a question of how long until we get there and who will bring it to us.
Disney World's Animal Kingdom has an Avatar-themed "ride" where you are linked to a banshee rider. And they make you wear these silly glasses, with thick, bulbous lenses.
So I'm there, mounted on a plastic motorbike, staring down in disbelief at the smaller-than-iPad display where the tachymeter and gauges would be. In front of me, in front of everyone to my left and right, is just plastic nothing. Plastic. And I think aloud, "Okay, are we gonna look down at this little screen the whole time?" The guy next to grins too: Where's the screen?
Then it starts. Holy crap. My entire field of vision is Pandora--up, down, left, right, everywhere.
And we are flying on banshees! I feel a moment of weightlessness as we careen down a canyon at the speed of gravity. I want to hoot and holler. It's pure joy, and my heart sings.
Absolutely—it’s also imagineering! Disney has done that for almost a century. But they make money because that’s their bread-and-butter. You’re buying an amazing experience at Disney, VR or otherwise.
Meta’s bread-and-butter is selling peoples data, irrespective of whether teens are committing suicide on their platforms.
You’re definitely right the technology has tons of potential. Lots of applications in, for instance, content-creation space as well.
The problem Meta ran into is that it’s difficult/impossible to make money on it. It’s a niche market at best, and it’s much more difficult to prove the value when compared to something like Facebook. Facebook is easy to use and provides social value to everyone on the planet. And I say that not using it myself but I live in a small town and all business here rely on Facebook; the municipalities use it to communicate; elderly use it… it’s accessible.
I’m sure the wall Carmack ran into was the shareholders. To shareholders it’s more often than not about profits. To Carmack it’s probably about the product he envisions, not the profits. But you can’t have both sustainably when folks can live without VR.
I would jump on the bandwagon if my VR headset was mine: like a computer I can install whatever I want there—not in a walled garden owned by Evil Corp.
The proper VR solution needs to be open source hardware and software. By the people, for the people. Reduce the barrier to entry and people will use it.
One more thing: those virtual avatars are impossible to take seriously. If I’m in a virtual boardroom filled with those, I might as well be playing Minecraft.
> I don't know about your friends, but playing Alyx opened my eyes to the level of immersion VR can achieve. It's a kind of gameplay that can't be repeated with 2d screens.
Every time I read something like this about VR I hear the same stuff I hear from like, audiophiles talking about gold plated cables and shit. I have a Rift, and I get a lot of use out of it for Beat Saber and VTOL VR, but there's no reason the latter can't be non-VR and I would categorize nearly everything I've ever played with it as a gimmick.
The experience is a little more immersive than a screen, but in my opinion not that significantly so especially considering all the drawbacks.
My experience is completely different. I haven't tried the oculus but I did play around with game development with the Vive 2 at university about 4(?) years ago. Maybe because it was room scale VR (eg you were physically walking around) but it was extremely good at immersing me to the point where memories of being inside (our rudimentary) game feel like memories of being in a space rather than memories of playing a game.
I think it's dumb to compare this to audiophile stuff with no proven benefit, it is a fundamentally different way of experiencing. The feeling of presence (as it is called in VR terms) is something that was really noticeable for me.
I suspect that maybe the immersion/presence just doesn't stick for certain people? I do know that I'm unusually good(?) at suspending disbelief and getting totally absorbed in media.
> Maybe because it was room scale VR (eg you were physically walking around) but it was extremely good at immersing me to the point where memories of being inside (our rudimentary) game feel like memories of being in a space rather than memories of playing a game.
Two things: One, room scale is extremely problematic for most people because they simply don't have an empty room to do it in. I own my own home and have a room free of obstacles to play VR stuff in, and yet I still occasionally hit walls with my fist and once slammed my head and shoulders into one pretty hard. Frequently in-game objects seem to be placed physically out of reach.
Second, I get that "I remember it like I was really there" feeling from a lot of 2D games I've spent significant amounts of time in. Recently while playing Scavenger SV-4 I felt distinctly unsafe during a certain in-game event despite being aware on some level that I wasn't actually in that situation in real life. Maybe there's only a certain kind of mind that can get that immersed on a screen though.
Yeah, physical movement is a big advantage. Gorn and Creed were also fun, but most of my time was spent with Beat Saber. Never tried Kinect / PS Move, but i doubt it's even close.
> a little more immersive
I wouldn't say a little... 10% to 20% maybe. That can be quite a nice bump for stuff counting on immersion. But again, the software has to properly use the system... my neck really hurt after playing Subnatica, and the play-through pretty much ended anyway due to Cyclops being pretty much uncontrollable.
I don't know about your friends, but playing Alyx
opened my eyes to the level of immersion VR can achieve.
I've had a lot of friends who liked a few VR games like Alyx but never really touched their headsets after that.
My feeling is less "VR stinks" and more "yes, it can be a really nifty gaming controller/display but there's a big gap between 'nifty gaming thing' and Zuckerberg's opium dream of a fulltime VR revolution."
The other issue is the killer game or app that gets people into VR en-masse.
We've already had a few five star VR games, so I don't think that's sufficient.
Maybe the "killer app" is more of a paradigm or framework. Like how we didn't have killer GUI applications until Xerox/Apple/Microsoft created the environment in which those apps could be created.
But, I don't know. Fundamentally I just don't think people want to strap these things to their heads.
There's a critical faulty assumption in your logic above ... we are on the verge of seeing multiple simultaneous technical barriers fall that will seriously alter your equation around comfort and immersion. micro-OLED screens are shipping this year which enable full immersion with pancake lenses at half the weight and greatly improved FOV. The next gen of chipsets will support resolutions and frame rates that eliminate screen door effect and nausea for a wide swathe of people.
Within 2 years we'll be looking at very different landscape for VR hardware. This is why people like Zuckerberg and companies like Apple are excited about it - they can see where the puck will be and they are skating to it, ignoring the critics operating on obsolete assumptions.
Nausea issue is not solvable by any standalone device. We'll either have direct brain jack-in that can override full range of sensory input (so there will be no dissonance between your sense of balance and vision) or we're stuck with mostly static experiences (teleporting point-to-point instead of moving etc.) which are not immersive.
Not seeing the first one delivered within 5 years for sure and probably not within 50.
Do you have numbers of the percentage of people who do get motion sickness from vr? Perhaps 50% of the population not going vomity is a large enough market? Perhaps 10%? As devices get better the market will grow. I can definitely feel off at 60Hz, but no problem so far at 120 if the latency is kept to a minimum.
Plenty of people get seasick, but there are still quite a few of us who enjoy sailing a day through a proper October Storm.
I don't have an exact number, but let me answer your question with another question — why else are the most popular VR games (Beatsaber, Alyx etc.) either completely static or move-by-teleport? My suspicion is that they were playtested _ad nauseam_ and this showed significant portion of the players to be affected.
> I can definitely feel off at 60Hz, but no problem so far at 120 if the latency is kept to a minimum.
This is a common misconception and the type of nausea I'm talking about has nothing to do with the screen update latency or head tracking latency. Strongest effect happens when you're mostly stationary in the real world (sitting or standing on the floor) but moving in VR (let's say riding a rollercoaster). In this case, your vision tells your body that you should feel acceleration/deceleration, but your inner ear tells your body you're completely stationary. This is a contradiction commonly associated with intoxication and body deals with it accordingly.
I accept that strength of the effect is different for everyone, for me personally when I tried the rollercoaster demo on Quest 1 nausea lasted for 2 hours (!) despite the fact that I was never seasick in my life before.
I am starting to think that Alyx is VR high tide point. It was either going to be the thing that makes folks and developers run to VR or just stand out there is a neat proof of concept that gets ignored. Alyx is now 2 years old, there hasnt been a rush towards the space yet...
Offload to local device with, yes. Offload to server farm elsewhere ... naaah. You have at most a few ms to compress - stream - decompress - refresh. Any latency, jitter, stutter, etc has a very negative impact in vr. Much more so than on a regular monitor.
> Wii Sports was a "killer app" for motion controls and that doesn't mean it was a technology that shaped our lives in the long run.
Perhaps it could have been different if companies didn’t just focus on using these technologies as leverage to increase their profits at “unicorn” levels and for unimaginative reasons. Carmack should have known better than to expect a huge, boring company like Facebook to be a good place for a maverick to make a major breakthrough.
> Honestly no one really cares about VR that’s the problem.
For some values of "no one". VR has been hanging on quite nicely despite repeated reports of it's demise. The problem is that some industry people keep expecting it to be iPhone huge and it's never going to be iPhone huge.
So - the truth is somewhere inbetween "no one" and "every one". Something above "niche" but below "mass market".
Virtual reality has been too abused. Is introduced typically a humorous home video when people is startled, hits some furniture with their fists or jumps over it, and unavoidably broke the very expensive TV in the wall.
Is shown as a room disaster, much more funny for the people watching the player than for the player itself.
And the people still wonder why people is not playing it in mass when you are mocking your own target? This is not how you sell a product.
Maybe stopping the "need for jumpscare to show how awesome is our game" would help. Dunno. Maybe just making the game aware of he surrounding would help (This big square is the limit, if the player walks next the frontier show a warning or made it take one step back).
VR and AR have essentially merged at this point. Nobody is releasing VR headsets without passthrough (and non-passthrough VR still isn't viable tech yet. cost, brightness and poor FOV are holding it back).
Passthrough AR inherently has the same FoV as VR so I'm having trouble interpreting your comment. I also don't see how brightness would be an issue for non-passthrough VR. Did you mean "non-passthrough AR", like the HoloLens?
He was alone on his side of the table for the All In One integrated hardware approach that was the Go and became the Quest and, after years, proved to be the right long term direction. Of course that is out of his mouth according to him but, if true, it is the kind of high level strategy setting that separates market leaders from the also ran's. Very different from task level involvement but friction there should be separate from effectiveness at the CTO's desk level (& I have to guess Boz is the one who's quality of life got improved more than specific engineering teams)
His critique resonates with my expectations from large enterprises, and your perception also resonates from what I expect of large enterprises workers. So I'm guessing he's probably not wrong and your experience was probably an example of him hitting social/political roadblocks. In my arguably limited human sized experience, the vast majority of people at Meta-sized companies prefer the safety and comfort of things going slowly and being discussed at length, and being careful to respect all the hoops that need jumping through. And not having their caged shaken too much. This leads to 5% GPU utilization.
Guess what buddy.... the entire fing executive management team is wading into areas they don't know this about, stabbing each other in the back, slowing progress due to corporate BS.
And so what if Carmack was 'wading into areas where he had no experience'? (What was he showing up at the quarterly internal financial review and advising on advance tax strategy with offshore account to line exec pockets???? ;
When you have a talent like that the organization makes space for them. It was never a cultural fit from the start.
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 communicators, and it is hurting all of our careers.
I think the notion of developers being 'weak communicators' is a bit too simplified. It suggests that if developers were better communicators, then things would move faster & better forward. But the fact is that the audience of non-developers tends to have a completely different mode of thinking, and indeed a different set of targets. Developers would like to see organizations as machines to give instructions to. Non-developers more often see organizations as ladders to climb. It would indeed be a miracle to persuade the latter people into machine-like thinking without a total cultural shift.
I think it's weird that people don't talk about non-developers being weak communicators because they often are as well. I guess it's because if a product manager is a bad communicator then they're just a bad product manager. While a developer can be a bad communicator but still a good developer.
> It suggests that if developers were better communicators, then things would move faster & better forward.
That is exactly what would happen, within developer circles themselves at least. A huge amount of miscommunication and lack of communication routinely takes place within dev teams, and that process knot forming behavior would be eliminated by better communications.
Good analogy. Ideally ladders are designed based on problem type - simple to complex. But in corporate wonderland, the ladder climbers regularly change that ideal to stay on the ladder.
You dont need a miracle. You just need to recognize early, who the most mindlessly ambitious over energetic unimaginative people, in the room are and keep them on leash/direct the energies away from ladder reconfig.
I think developers in my experience are very clear communicators, and PMs & managers tend to be poor communicators or at least communicators who have goals very disaligned from that of the company.
I don't doubt he speaks like an engineer because is basically is THE uber-engineer. He should be treated more as an oracle than an engineer. There aren't many people I would say that about in the world of computing, but Carmack definitely is that.
You could be right about all of this, but it isn't very compelling without more concrete detail.
From the perspective of a neutral observer, what we're getting here is one anonymous person's interpretation of Carmack's behavior, and we don't know anything about this person. So for all we know, it's equally possible that this person is arrogant and narcissistic and takes disagreement as bullying.
Not saying I actually believe this of you, but there are plenty of such people in the tech industry. So I don't know what to think here.
>> When data proved his idea was wrong, he would say words to the effect of "I don't care, because I still believe I'm right from an ideological background". He would devalue people, there expertise, there experience, and there thoughts because "I'm John Carmack"
Projecting are you? You're devaluing someone with way more experience and accomplishment than you. Did it ever occur to you that he was right? I've read a lot of his posts that cover ideology, and I always agree. Ideology is what it takes to go big and play a long game. If the short term stuff does fail (even his) it is appropriate to fall back to ideology to figure out what to do next.
I also never saw anything revolutionary in his work. He's really good at selecting practical and straight forward approaches to real problems. If he says "that's stupid and here's why", it's worth listening to even if you can make it work.
If i had nickel for every time i had been in a conversation where someone “proved they were right” even though they were nowhere near there, ok, i wouldn’t have millions but I’d have somewhere in the $50s which is a lot higher than you’d expect
Indeed. I couldn't believe Facebook bet so much on VR, and especially a low-quality 3D MMORPG full of micropayments. With no LEGS. How long have video game characters had legs??
I feel dizzy even playing Minecraft on a plain screen. I won't ever buy VR goggles. Let alone ones bound to a Facebook account.
Zuck must’ve been high when OKing VR, I still think Google Glass is the way forward with augmented reality. Very comfortable and isn’t trying to rewrite how humans communicate.
I have VR and it is immersive, but way too uncomfortable.
If you imagine arbitrarily good technology VR still feels like a niche while it's easy to imagine lots of uses for a lightweight stylish internet-connected HUD that supplies realtime information--even if we're talking years in the future. I tend to believe this is one of the next consumer (and industrial) device categories but a long way to go as a wearable. (We'll presumably see it on a phone first.)
Google Glass was not arbitrarily good technology. And, while the glasshole thing may have been a factor in its demise, if you look around privacy factors don't much deter the use of anything people actually find useful.
You don't need to store video for AR to work. Besides, people take video and photos of others all the time and upload to the Internet without permission of the subject whether that's technically allowed or not in a given country.
Oh the legs thing again. I don't want legs (or arms) until they are out of the uncanny valley. No legs is better than janky legs in the same way stylized graphics are better than bad "realistic" graphics.
I've heard they bet on VR for the same reason Microsoft bet on a mobile phone -- they want to own a device ecosystem. It makes a lot more sense to me in that context.
FWIW, my interactions with Carmack have shown him to be extremely pragmatic when it comes to tech. Going quickly from “we absolutely shouldn’t do that” to “ok it makes sense in that context”.
> When I hear people say "If only Meta would let Carmack do what he wants we'd see his ideal VR experience and it would be amazing". You already saw it. It was Oculus Go, and by every metric is was a commercial, financial, and technical, disaster.
Hasn't Carmack always been pretty clear about wanting Meta to deliver an ultra-low-cost high-volume headset prioritizing getting them in as many hands as possible? Did Oculus Go deliver this? Because Carmack has seemed to be constantly complaining about this with every germane talk he's given to date...
I know someone who built a solid business around using the Oculus Go to show off kitchen designs to prospective buyers. The fact that the Go was a cheap-ish stand-alone Android device was really valuable for them.
I've watched many Carmack videos over the years and he never complained about the team not following him or people working for him being not good enough, he always praised the work done and explained in very fine details why the decisions where taken one way or another.
When he wanted to remove a pebble from his shoe, he talked extensively of the company decisions, in the higher ups, which is more than fair given his role.
He never struck me as a "Steve Jobs of coding" (probably today Elon Musk?).
I also had several encounters with John Romero and talked a bit about the times at id Software and he never ever hinted that Carmack was problematic in any way.
He's also obviously not a very good politician/sellperson (he can't sell what he hasn't already produced or envisioned) and suffers bureaucracy, like every normal person here that is not a bureaucrat.
Anyway.
Regardless of the truthfulness of what you write, Carmack has always been able to deliver, both in time and as of code quality and maintainability, one way or another, Meta hasn't.
The evidence pile up more against FB/Meta management than against Carmack, moreover I think it's easy to attack the person taking responsibility in person than those hiding in the shadows, Linus suffered the same destiny, but he created Linux and brought it where it is now, the attackers didn't, so maybe Linus was simply right.
Check out Lex Fridman and John Carmack interview. Also read Masters of Doom. I think the key with Carmack is that he's a workaholic, and he expects the same from the ones around him.
Their point was that it means something when someone who was badly hurt still praises the person who did it. (“Did it” is shorthand for the full story.)
From the Dallas Observer article quoted by story I linked to (Jan 1999):
"Throughout it all, ION Storm has been hemorrhaging employees; of the approximately 85 people ION employed a year ago, more than half have quit or been let go. Finally, six weeks ago, virtually the entire team working on Daikatana jumped ship and joined Wilson's company."
To think that John Romero has the slightest bit of credibility as a character witness when it comes to such issues is so far from reality it is almost funny.
Interesting perspective. One ominous anecdote is I've noticed that kids seem to have lost interest in the Oculus / VR. I'm assuming the business model needs to be bootstrapped with games and then move into other areas. I hope it is successful however, the world will be kind of boring if all we ever have is screens.
I'm gonna dismiss this whole story, since it's anonymous, while the person you're criticizing (Carmack) isn't.
First, we have no idea what "evidence" or "data" you allege that disproved Carmack, or how Carmack insisted on being right "from an ideological background" (whether that even happened at all).
Second, Carmack is one of the most data-driven and performance-oriented programmers you can find, and is quick to admit errors where he is wrong; to suggest that he is ideology-first (which, from his Twitter and public statements, has never been the case) over truth in tech matters - is bonkers-insane.
And it's such an easy thing to call out someone you dislike as "toxic", just because you disagree with them. Your statement also makes no sense: the phrase 'politely toxic' is an oxymoron - as when one 'politely disagrees', it suggests reasonable disagreement, not outright difficultness.
Further, "good, and in some cases legally required, work" can be work that have nothing to do with the end goals - it could even be baseline administrative work.
Not sure I’d trust someone who mixes up ‘their’ and ‘there’ to interpret data proving or disproving some strategy. From the looks of the product, I’d say he was probably right on whatever that stuff was.
it could be auto(in)correct, perhaps via dictation.
i'm a language and grammar stickler and rewritten spellings in dictation and just plain autocorrect sometimes sneak by, particularly since iOS started correcting at a delay and several words back.
I once wished a girlfriend that her presentation would be "kick ass" but she got a text wishing it to be "lick ass". But it was obviously autocorrect being stubborn.
By reading between the lines of your story and carmack's, my guess is carmack was against facebook user profiling in VR headsets, and you think the sales numbers are sufficient and prove him wrong. If that's the case I'm with Carmack both because "the ideological background" and because the sales argument does not hold : you don't know what the sales would have been (and will be in the future) if facebook did not strong arm users into surrendering their privacy
> It was Oculus Go, and by every metric is was a commercial, financial, and technical, disaster.
It was the second best selling VR headset at that time, only behind PSVR1. The only problem with it was that it came too late. GearVR had been around since 2015 already, Go was essentially just a standalone version of that, but it took until 2018 to release. That was simply to late, as a year later it was replaced by the Quest1 and 3DOF VR was killed.
Another problem with the Go was that Facebook didn't put effort into good 3DOF content. They never released a VR180-3D camera. Never build their own VR video platform. And finally they made Quest2 deliberately incompatible with Go, despite Quest1 still having some compatibility.
There was and still is a lot of unnecessary fracturing going on in the VR space, even among Meta's own headsets. I think the Go line should simple have been continued with a stronger focus on movie instead of gaming. The Nreal Air shows what is possible when going that direction and Meta with an 8 year head start should have an easy time matching that. Instead we only got Quest2, which is much more heavy and low resolution than it needs to be for a movie headset.
Carmack has also had a lot of wins.
His accomplishments stand on their own.
Perhaps he is not a good people person.
He puts in an astonishing amount of effort on his pursuits
or at least he used to.
He may expect the same of others, not understanding that
the majority of people have different lives and goals.
He might also just be an asshole.
It will be interesting to see what he does next.
I think he still has one or two wins left in him.
I think he meant commercially, technically (ideologically?) for me it was an amazing iphone/ipad like innovation - integrating samsung gear in one standalone easy to use package. I'd still use it for certain apps.
https://www.reddit.com/r/OculusGo/comments/rnphlq/was_the_oc...
Oculus Go formed one of the starting points for 6DOF mobile VR (even though the Quest1 'Santa Cruz' was already in development).
If the comment was truthful, here it shows some bias. There are always multiple sides to a story.
> When data proved his idea was wrong, he would say words to the effect of "I don't care, because I still believe I'm right from an ideological background".
I cannot imagine commercial software in any form where that is not the prevailing sentiment. I have heard of developers who actually measure things in the capacity of their corporate employment but in 20 years of doing this work I have only seen it once.
As such I don’t even bother mentioning performance or correctness at work (across all my employers) where evidence is so hastily discarded and inconvenient conclusions are a suicide pill.
Steve Jobs once said: “ It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to to , We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”
Someone who is visionary, accustom to being in charge, and uses their intuition/gut as their compass because they fully understand the buck stops with them.
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 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.
The person in your head is a source of inspiration. The person in the world, on which the former is based, is a source of disappointment.
More than that, I think it's important to remember that no one, even a technologist as strong as Carmack, is going to get more right than wrong.
Carmack has been a huge inspiration for me over the years. I grew up eagerly reading his plan files.
But if we look at the big picture, a lot of his big calls haven't in fact worked out.
His vision for the future of graphics was to stick closer to the original OpenGL state machine, and just make it so blazing fast you could do complex lighting and materials via accumulating 100's of passes per frame. The world chose shaders instead, and I don't think they got that wrong.
Stencil buffer shadows were a dead end.
iD tech used to set the standard for the entire industry, but long term its totally lost out to Unreal and Unity.
Carmack's ideas around sparse voxel trees were really interesting to me at the time, but now with hindsight I can see he totally misunderstood what artists want/need. They don't want to uniquely paint every bit of the game world, they want tools that let them use instancing and smart materials/shapes. In comparison Unreal's Nanite gets this totally right. Artist productivity is the key constraint in both film and games.
I don't say this to be pointlessly negative. As I said JC is one of my personal heros. But the problem with the "superman" approach to coding is no one is in fact superman, even someone like JC. It's just not possible to get complex calls like this right long term. If you don't pay that some respect in your interpersonal behavior, you are gonna end up alienating people.
> Carmack's ideas around sparse voxel trees were really interesting to me at the time, but now with hindsight I can see he totally misunderstood what artists want/need. They don't want to uniquely paint every bit of the game world, they want tools that let them use instancing and smart materials/shapes. In comparison Unreal's Nanite gets this totally right. Artist productivity is the key constraint in both film and games.
Aren't voxels and instances/shapes orthogonal? Do artists really care if the shapes are textures or pictures wrapped on triangles or pictures wrapped on voxels?
The real argument for Voxels is analogous to the argument for raytracing. It is more accurate at describing how the world works, but we currently don't have the computational power to do it in anything close to realtime in advanced games -- even with lots of optimizations.
If you have a single world representation made out of voxels, you can't trivially edit instanced objects and have the changes propagate out to the whole world where all the instances were. Or if you get that feature, it comes at the cost of the voxels being a secondary representation, and now the instance updates potentially trample some custom textures/geometry that were placed on top of the instances. It changes the workflow a lot.
Adding more realistic lighting also completely changed workflows from adding random pseudo light sources to having to describe how light should work on various things (this is before considering ray tracing). Those changes were better for realism which was better for users and that trumps artists having to learn new things.
> iD tech used to set the standard for the entire industry, but long term its totally lost out to Unreal and Unity.
Unless you fault Carmack for selling id to Bethesda, this isn't so much Carmack's fault. He always proposed more sharing of id tech. Look at the older versions of the engine that are available under GPL. Unreal really took over when they started their cheap licensing with source available. Bethesda was asleep.
iD tech was already floundering before the acquisition. I obviously don't fault JC for taking the bag.
Unreal was always far cheaper and way better supported than iD tech. This is something iD got very wrong from the very beginning. iD was "give us 500k, here's a cd rom, and never talk to us again." Epic was considerably less (I forget exactly but I want to say 100k), and was all "ok, here's the email list, here's the news group, here's the IRC channel, and here's some folks you can talk to when you get stuck."
All the Unreal licenses collaborated and helped each other underneath Epic's umbrella. iD licensees had to do again working around iD's hostility/apathy.
There was no comparison in the quality of the toolchains either. Quake's kit did the job, but with a ton of flaky behavior and horrible UX. The BSP code had so many numerical issues level designers were constantly reworking stuff to prevent leaks. Unreal was an absolute dream in comparison.
Cliffy B sending you unsolicited porn pics over IRC was more of a "perk." /s
Source: was contracted on an Unreal port to the Playstation 1 by Infogrames back in the day.
Again, JC is one of my personal heroes, but I think people are reluctant to point out he got a lot of stuff just wrong vs choices others made. His tendency towards contrarian independence is a double edged sword.
Is it possibly because he lacks the academic rigour? I don't think casually reading math (or any) texts as a $50M+ net worth individual is remotely the same as having to study and pass tests like a regular person.
I'm an autodidact and that's something I definitely struggle with. I'm good at getting the "gist" of something by scanning fast, but then I get hung up in the details because I didn't go back and actually work through the formalisms in the paper.
JC strikes me as someone that would do the math however, or at least would code up something that probed it real quick.
Just to ramble about another point I wish I'd made in my post above: I've had some success in my career by depersonalizing these kind of debates. Instead of "my plan" vs "your plan" try to frame it as everyone enumerating the possible plans as a group, brainstorming on benefits vs risks on each of them, etc. So if I set myself up as facilitator on the white board aggregating everything, without pushing my own view much, I find it tends to get less into back and forth arguments. Not a silver bullet but that depersonalization is a big part of how I think about these dilemmas now.
Agree. I’ve been on both sides of this. Forced to learn things as a student as well as rushing through self curated material for a particular purpose. There is definitely some value in simply being a student. Spending 8 years studying to get a phd in math doesn’t guarantee that you will be an outlier (like Carmack) but you will have a solid foundation. I think both types of people are needed to make progress realistically.
You know, maybe he just has a huge blind spot when it comes to optimization: Because he's so good at it, he overestimates others' ability (and possibly appetite for - I personally find optimization grueling and soul deadening work though of course needs to be done)
Carmack aside, I think the "never meet your heroes" thing is even simpler: no one's perfect. Your hero could have cured cancer but maybe they're a nervous wreck in public. Or aren't native to your area and may commuicate badly face to face for culture clashing reasons. Or maybe they are great in a small intimate team but completely fall apart in a large setting. Heck it could be as simple as finding out they are a heavy smoker or an alcoholic.
The common stereotype is "heroes are narcissitic and have skeletons in the closet", but there are valid reasons for an otherwise good person to fail in what may be common sense to others.
To me it would be the opposite; we all have our faults, so how do they manage the feats that they do?
There's no point idolizing people for their accomplishments in the "they must be perfect" kind of way.
Ie I look at John and see someone amazingly fit for their age (very close to mine - only a few years older, yet he appears younger); I'd like to learn more about his routines (running and judo?) to see how I might benefit from the same.
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.
I don't think many people loved Jobs, and a good few hated him.
But unlike most narcissistic assholes he was unusually good at certain things [1]. And he could be persuaded to change his mind when he was dead wrong, at least some of the time.
So that made him tolerated.
[1] Finding good people, understanding that computing is about services and UX and not just boxes, and having a goal for commodity computing that was at least as aesthetic as technological.
I had the privilege of meeting Claude, at the CMU Robotics Institute, and showed him how to use (what turned out to be) an early incarnation of of Boston Dynamics -- a hopping pogo stick. Here you can see an operator using the same control box that Claude Shannon used: https://youtu.be/mG_ZKXo6Rlg?t=34 p.s. yes, that 'operator' in the video is me.
Well said but we don’t know for sure if the above is true. Carmack is a genious programmer and rather than trash him right away we should acknowledge that his job was hard- very hard. In any biography the failures are way more interesting than the successes. The ancient greek understood that pretty well.
As you mention, the world is about cult of personality, not just hacker news. Look at the situation with influences and such and why brands are following over themselves to link there products with some personality.
We like to think it's some super human person that is some for of genius, but there are very real limits to human intelligence and while there are some admittedly great and lucky people in that regard, they are still very limited and would likely be disappointing if we knew what the rest of there lives were like outside of what we see.
In some ways we seem to love the idea that others are just somehow more gifted than we are and then idolize them, we don't like to accept that everyone is just making it up as they go along all the time, maybe it's a defense mechanism in some ways as it keeps us from doing some of the more exciting things that we could do, because that's only for these special people that we somehow idolize and of course to make it worse, these people generally love the attention so play up to that even more.
A young fan of James Joyce once asked the Irish maestro, "May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?" The novelist replied: "No, it did lots of other things too."
There are many people lurking on HN who do not fall for the cult of personality and stick to technical and personal topics. You should look around for them! They’re cool.
PG has been an inspiration but he gets things wrong all the time. Most famous Silly Valley leaders are people I’d steer well clear of.
If you want a hero to idolize, select someone who's been dead for at least 100 years. Most of their foibles will be public knowledge by that time, so you probably won't be in for any rude surprises.
Even that might not be entirely safe, as Schrödinger's behaviour has only become widely known in recent years for example. (Although he died around 60 years ago, so not quite 100.)
> 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.
I'm not one to defend the culture here but this isn't fair. Everyone is like this and it has nothing to do with HN. They do it with politicians, rock stars, capitalists, etc. Just look at the cult of Elon Musk. And they do it because all of those people put a lot of money and work into making sure they do it. Worship is paid for. That's what PR and image firms do, not to even mention that it's the default culture of the media in pretty much every country on the planet.
I'm pretty sure you don't know what you're talking about. Carmack has been covered by multiple PR departments, sometimes simultaneously, throughout his career. Knuth literally has publishers doing that work and I don't know what you think the Nobel committee or ACM Turing Awards are for. That's their entire purpose, to promote these people for their accomplishments. It's not like they hide that. And what do you know, Bellard isn't even remotely as popular as those others. I wonder why.
Yep. There are lots of talented people, programming wise, who can't communicate vision, lead, or inspire teams. These are mostly orthogonal to technical skill, but are extremely important if you're building something that requires more than one person.
What comes to mind is how hard it is to get low-latency user experiences out of a comglometate of teams exchanging data via blocks. I would expect someone like Carmack to have to interact with such teams in ways that they’ll find intrusive
Given the fact that this is a throwaway account your credibility on this matter is less then zero. In fact this sounds like as if your project was shut down by Carmack and now your ego is bruised.
It takes two.
If accurate and true, there is an obvious conflict between the two of you. John perhaps didn't listen to your point of view enough and in the reverse you didn't respect his view and role in the company.
His success was your success and it would seem you both failed as a result of the conflict.
Tech is full of difficult personality and ego. It's multicultural and communication challenges and cultural differences are common are often misinterpreted.
At the end of the day though, many of us just want compassion and respect in our roles, to be valued and heard.
All said, feel in this described circumstance that perhaps the initial folly was all indeed John's. He held the power after all to make the right start.
This is an interesting comment. In my experience most people were right in their way of thinking. Even if they come to vastly different conclusions, most of the time they are kind-of-right. This continues until objective reality hits as in "can we ship" and "does it make money". And even then it depends on many factors with many people involved. For a vision like VR this is far into the uncertain future and "being right" can mean many different things to people. Data doesn't help much if it is biased, if the analysis is biased or if you just have different definitions and priorities.
At the end of the day the real struggle is achieving alignment on business goals and priorities across the whole team. And also aligning them with reality. This is usually where you elect one leader to define those things and the others to follow those definitions.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but I have trouble believing that someone in your position would mistake "above" for "among" and not know the difference between "their" and "there." Surely a company like Meta has higher standards for written English.
Big corps usually prohibit their employees from expressing their personal opinions. It’s sometimes tolerated but always against the employment contract. So whenever you’re saying something, bigcorp could decide that “this one’s too far”. On a topic with as much PR as this one, it’s rather dangerous to comment on if you gave a medium-to-high level position.
The reason big corps do it is so that their PR department has ANY chance of sending a coherent message. So it’s not even evil behaviour IMHO.
All that to say, I understand why they used an anonymous account. Of course, that doesn’t mean one has to believe them, it’s their word against Carmack’s. But it’s good to hear that perspective IMO.
> Big corps usually prohibit their employees from expressing their personal opinions.
Yes, but does that make it any better though? We understand why they have to do it anonymously, but it's still someone with nothing at stake, who we can't evaluate the claims of.
I'm not sure there is much of substance to evaluate. If we fired every technical lead who sometimes "waded into areas with no experience," issued orders, followed a conviction or two and occasionally provided disparaging feedback, there would be no good engineers left. The bullying and devaluing claims are worth investigation, but that's always very subjective and range from "my boss disagrees with me" to horrific abuse.
I don't disagree, and I was in a similar position not too long ago.
But it also doesn't change the fact that this is ultimately hearsay. Maybe this was someone who butted heads and ultimately had the better idea go by the wayside because they lacked clout. Maybe they are a gilted employee whose full story would make them feel like how they described Carmack. We don't know and on the internet it's way too easy to pretend to that sabetour who never even worked at Meta but is very angry about some design decision in Quake 3.
There's ultimately no good way to do PR as a non-PR employee for that reason, even if the big corp allowed it. You either put your name on the line or you just say nothing. Most employees choose the latter. Your best bet if you have any real evidence and want impact is to seek a journalist for coverage and anonymity.
Anything else is simply a footnote to keep in mind until (if ever) some big bust happened.
You can, but I'm not that anonymous (one can easily find my name by searching for my username, not that there's much interesting to find anyway). More importantly, I wouldn't try to damage a person's reputation if I wasn't ready to stand behind what I said and, if proven wrong myself, take some responsibility. I think a few negative things were said about his personality, which can be damaging. An anonymous internet comment is not the most credible source though.
Disclaimer: I don't work for Meta, don't know Carmack, etc.
You can't attack others like this here. Since you've been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly in other contexts as well, I've banned this account. Please don't create accounts to do this with.
Well, from what I have experienced, the people who dare to say “I don’t care” in a corporate settings are usually much trust worthy than those been polite. Also most of time he said that because of the sheet frustration from the enormous BS that surround him.
People with attitudes like yours are why Zuckerberg _WILL_ fail in his vision. If Meta VR cannot be more compelling than video games, it is and will continue to be Dead on Arrival. Good luck though, with your feelings and whatnot. The "avatars" that Mark was forced to present are frankly embarrassing and humiliating in this day and age. 5% GPU utilization is a joke. Mark's gotta give all of you the boot. I'm happy for John that he got to escape that sycophantian paradise.
I understand this year they presented much more believable avatars, but yeah presenting Second Life as a next gen experience must have been frustrating for John.
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 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 left, it seemed like whatever wasn't planned for upfront at the planning meetings for each half just won't happen. Around 2018 I came to a team with a small feature request that I was happy to take on myself as long as they'd provide code review. I was told if I'd come to them a month ago they might've been able to do it, but now I'd need to wait until planning for the next half.
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. Zoom become the dominant video conferencing service pretty quickly. We failed to roll out Zoom support until October of 2020, when everyone had already established their video conferencing routines and were less likely to see the benefit of a dedicated device.
Portal ended up failing so hard as a consumer product that it got transferred over to the Workplace division.
I'd argued internally that at the very least we should allow sideloading of apps. Portal is just Android. People could run their videoconferencing application of choice, as well as any other apps. That would make the Portal more competitive versus an Android tablet, which all have okay videoconferencing as well as the whole world of Android apps.
The Portal camera is fisheye so we'd need to modify Android to let regular apps pull a normal image using the Android camera APIs, but that's totally doable.
In the distant past these kinds of requests would've at least gotten engagement from people working on the product. In 2020, they got a chipper response from a contractor who I guess filed them in a feature requests tool where they went to die. Oh, the contractor also would provide directions on how to use the web browser in lieu of apps. Like the first iPhone.
>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 to have a private conversation or meeting using Facebook infrastructure or be forced to create a Facebook account to join a meeting. As far as Zoom support, again, why would anyone trust Facebook infrastructure with private meetings?
Aside from the trust issue, why buy hardware from FB just to have meetings?
> 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.
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.
> Similarly, if Meta bought Zoom (and kept it running as it does today), most businesses probably wouldn't switch. Zoom already owns the market.
Zoom's continued survival still surprises me. There was a point in time during its meteoric rise, early in the pandemic, when stories broke about it being spyware for China and a security threat, and its use was subsequently banned in many places. Then some months later people were back to using it, as if nothing ever happened.
Zoom had appaling security when it started being used by the masses. But it did the right thing, acquired Keybase which were doing really great work in the field of security and UX, and they subsequently fixed the problems Zoom had (stories about spyware for China are bullshit, as usual, they just had just *really* basic issues like anyone was allowed to crash into a meeting by just knowing its ID, which used to be easy to guess). Today, I consider Zoom a solid, safe choice for private meetings until something new comes to light that proves otherwise.
I think you're forgetting the core controversy, which was that their marketing materials proudly claimed they used end-to-end encryption, which was just completely false at the time.
Zoom has by far the best feature set out of any videoconferencing system - Zoom Rooms work almost seamlessly, and the core product is pretty user friendly and incredibly reliable from my experience - something I've never been able to say about Hangouts, Teams, Skype, GoToMeeting or Webex.
I donr use zoom much but it has a very intuitive UI - everything is easy to discover.
Meanwhile in TEAMS people dont know how to do things.
Recently I had a meeting that was supposed to be recorded, firsf nobody could record it; now the supplier side does not know how to share it as a downloadable file.
The Microsoft cloud experience is pure trash from productivity point of view.
My favorite thing about Zoom (and I suspect a large portion of its staying power) is that it somehow manages to just work on every device, even if your device is slow or your internet connection is garbage. Heck, I’ll be on a Zoom call on my phone driving in a rural area with two bars and I’ll somehow still get grainy video.
In comparison, I use teams for my two person startup and we can only get that absolute trash fire working reliably about 75% of the time.
So? OP claimed nobody was willing to do private communication on facebook/meta infrastructure. More than 2 Billion people on the planet do just that on WhatsApp, which is Meta. It doesn't matter that WhatsApp started as its own thing, it is owned by Meta and people use it all the time for very private things.
Facebook messenger is another example, hundreds of million of people use it all the time.
> There are a large number of people who would never want to have a private conversation or meeting using Facebook infrastructure
Seriously, this is a really dense comment from previous poster. Sure people don't like the idea of a dedicated hardware appliance with camera and microphones from Meta but the idea that folks are so paranoid that they won't use any of Meta's private communications systems or infra is beyond out of touch with reality.
I had a couple models of Portal. Really useful products but they literally didn't iterate on adding features fast enough and they locked it out from the existing Android ecosystem. Too complacent IHMO. On top of that the built-in browser was a purposely limited version of chromium that seemed like whatever the custom user-agent was would just cause problems with all sorts of web-apps especially Google's (couldn't even sign into YouTube etc, got "unsupported browser" errors all the time).
The Portal TV is still the only good Consumer Home TV based VC system I've ever used (so good that its the only Portal device Cisco wouldn't ship WebEx on probably because it would be too competitive against their own hardware I suspect is the reason).
> 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.
If you talk about privacy they don’t care but they absolutely do when it comes to “I was talking to my friend about X and suddenly I’m seeing ads for it everywhere - my phone must be listening to me”. Their phone may not actually be listening to them but as soon as they see what it means, people hate how their data is used. They just never made the connection before.
Totally different usecase. My elderly parents LOVE theirs - it's simple to make calls, the camera quality is great, the automatic pan and zoom was top notch (especially for following toddlers around the room, which was crucial to them to see their grandchildren during lockdown).
The story mode was much loved as well - my mother (an ex kindergarten teacher) would read the stories to my niece and nephew and they loved the AR effects and filters it applied to her, in tandem with the story.
It’s clearly not intended to compete with a smartphone. It’s 50 times the size and mains powered. It’s intended to be an always-on device with a wide camera and large screen that makes it easy for a few people to talk on video. Like video conferencing.
My family uses them so my parents can see my kids and they are great. We plop down on the floor in front of it and everyone has a chat, sees the kids, etc. propping up phones and straining to hear/see things is much inferior.
The elevator pitch I heard, was that it would be ideal for connecting grandparents who would struggle with existing videoconferencing software. So it would be a supplemental device -- not a replacement -- with ease of use for non-technical people being a main driver of adoption. It would be a wonderful gift to help keep in touch, though pricey.
This was conceived prior to the implosion of the Facebook brand during the Cambridge Analytical revelations. It's hard to say for sure how successful Portal would have been in another universe where that didn't happen.
There's probably more people using WhatsApp securely in authoritarian hellholes and nightmarish war zones around the world than many of the alternatives you are thinking of combine.
Personally I wouldn't use any chat service for super sensitive conversations about company comms and IP that didn't have strong encryption as well as limitations on how messages can be backed up as well as disappearing messages. I think Signal is the only system that is semi-popular that does this where by default backups don't leave the device unencrypted.
As a recent insider, this is one of those things where the outside perception doesn't match the inside at all.
Privacy is taken more seriously at Facebook than any other place I've ever worked. It's drilled into you from day one that we have systems in place to catch you accessing things you shouldn't and you will be immediately fired if you do.
You can make mistakes that bring the entire site down and cost the company millions and they won't fire you. If you try to bypass privacy controls on an ex-girlfriend's post, you're gone.
Yes, they hoover up a ton of personal data. But they guard it like the crown jewels. If you do want your data deleted, they'll delete it. I've worked on the systems responsible for this where we had to reason through what to do with things like offline backups.
I appreciate you making the point, but it sounds like the perception is correct, but the definitions don't match. Individual-human-level privacy controls are important, and it's good that they're in place, but equally important is the systemic use of all that hoovered data.
Sure, but I expect most people's primary threat model isn't that a rogue Facebook employee will access their data and use it to stalk them. It's that Facebook will sell their data to advertisers who will use it to better manipulate them, or to insurance companies who will raise their rates.
That’s another common misperception, that Facebook sells data. They don’t. They sell targeted advertising that uses that data. The advertiser API specifies descriptors for who should see the ads. There’s no facility for accessing private data.
Selling the data itself would be giving away a huge component of what differentiates their product from other advertising platforms. It would be like Coca Cola selling the recipe for Coca Cola.
That's true, but most users aren't going to understand or care about that distinction. And for the concern of targeted ads creepily following them everywhere, it doesn't matter.
I know there are lots of people here knowingly redefining the meaning of sell in this regard, but doing so is really harmful to the privacy cause since most companies do actually sell user data so we need that distinction.
This comment could not be more wrong. The Portal failed because for exactly the reason the parent pointed out: it can't run the video conferencing apps people need it too.
If it's just Android then yeah, intercept the camera API to let the portal stuff work with any app and you've got yourself a killer product getting put on every grandparents TV.
I get the feeling that the Quest Pro is a similar game changing experience, but the strategy tax from being forced into Facebook services is absolutely suffocating.
I am legit excited about the idea of having VR eye contact, and would gladly pilot headsets for my team. But nobody wants to be on Facebook's platform. It's embarrassing to even talk about it. And I'm frustrated that something that should be a fun, cool, liberating, wide open new platform is so stifled and locked down.
> The Quest allows both sideloading and third party app stores
When did that happen? Last I checked, sideloading was a potentially bannable offense (as in effectively bricking your device and losing you your Facebook account).
One didn't need FB account at the start either. Nothing says they won't bring it back despite backlash.
Even if they have now changed their opinion on what can be done a large amount of damage is done. No-one will actively monitor that have their changed their terms. I was also under the impression that it's FB account and do the tiniest mistake and you lose it all. Thankfully it's just FB account so unlike with Google no real damage will be done.
Even if the things are better now I kinda have moved on, like many others.
If you sideload pirated copies of commercial games that are on the Quest store, that's forbidden. But sideloading 3rd-party apps is fine.
The "grey area" is modding games(notably Beat Saber), since it involves replacing the APK with an altered one without the consent of the developer. And if the developer sells DLC, that cuts into their profit and maybe they'll threaten to sue Facebook for damages since they created the development tools and authorized development accounts that allow people to do it.
> 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.
In contrast to all other comments, Portal was/is one of the best done video conferencing product made before pendamic, and fully support your speculation.
I wanted to buy it for personal work meetings usage, corporate usage to setup in conferencing room, etc, but..
Ye you get an apartheid atmosphere when the amount of contractors go so high that they can't be experts anymore.
Oh so now there is a Xmas lunch, but a third of the group is not invited. Or "No ice cream" for you.
It is funny how it was the small things that pissed me off. Who in their right mind even has a Xmas lunch without everyone ...
It was always one manager layer disconnected from the actual contractors that pulled off the BS meany things. The direct management knew that had to give ice cream to contractors too.
The portal devices wouldn't have succeeded even if it came with lunch voucher for a 1:1 with the Zuck himself. The devices failed as a consumer product due to years of Facebook disregarding users privacy and their focus on growth at all costs. Zuck has become nothing more than a meme ceo and the only reason he hasn't been removed by the board is because of the king like structure that he has setup for himself.
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 of the larger org. With Meta’s push towards VR it’s obvious Oculus’s purpose is now Meta’s purpose. And all the downside that comes with such a thing.
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.
Yea, it was great. But it was more lack of maintenance than anything. The original chat devs were passionate about open federation. The new devs were not.
Add to that it was a big source of spam that nobody wanted to deal with.
Apparently the team tried really hard to get more companies on board with opening up federation. But I think the only "major" service that did was what was left of AOL.
> Is that how Google ended up with eight chat apps
Its more because they killed their already working, well-accepted Google Chat app, not seeing gigantic profit or any market control benefit from it. Somehow they thought it was a better idea to have some 'chat' through the browser - which resulted in whatever 'Hangouts' was. Prioritized 'engineering' and profits over users as its so normal for large public corporations.
Then Slack and Discord came and wiped the floor with all of them.
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.
I kinda wonder if there is a type of employee who likes working at dying firms. Every year their job gets easier with fewer demands. Failure becomes kinda expected.
I’m reminded of someone I met at a party who actually worked for Sears. They’d spent many years at Amazon on the retail side of the business, in the earlier days of Amazon. Sears hired several people with this background in Seattle to turn their business around.
Pretty quickly, they figured out upper management had no interest in their ideas to make Sears into a viable online retailer. Everybody left or started coasting. They all knew the company was doomed but cashed their paychecks. After all, that’s literally what they were being paid to do.
WeWork is living dead, taking down and feasting on the flesh of the living. Their financials are so bad that there is no possibility of rescue, only the matter of the timing and details of end. Meanwhile the coworking space continues to be critical for an increasing fraction of the workforce. Those companies that actually live in this space by charging members fees that pay for the property and services required have a huge challenge competing with WeWork. It is a textbook case of venture capital doing terrible damage to an entire sector without actually contributing anything. The capital will be burned through and WeWork and other companies will die and then maybe we can start again for real. It is so frustrating.
Yeah, but I’m sure most of those businesses would have done their due diligence on WeWorks financials before moving in.
Changing offices is an expensive exercise so they wouldn’t want to risk renting space from somewhere that is likely to go under in the next year or two.
The whole point of wework from a customer perspective is that you don’t have to commit to long 10-year leases. So wework leases long-term and the customers short-term. If the customers dry up wework still needs to pay their commitments.
My point is the dynamic I mention explains the problems of wework, and is not proved wrong by the argument you put forward, paraphrased, that "businesses have evaluated long-term risk of renting at wework so wework is not at risk"
Your second attempt at paraphrasing my comment is still way off the mark.
You keep discussing a long term context yet my comment was just as much about short term risk too.
You don’t have to agree with me, but I’d appreciate it if you didn’t “paraphrase” my comment in a way that’s disingenuous to the original point it was making.
I paraphrased to try to reach a common ground, not as a kind of trick, but I understand you don't agree with the gist of the argument. We will have to agree to disagree, and that is ok.
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.
Search is already heavily ML-powered. Right now it’s impossible to provide ad-sponsored fully-AI-powered search and make it profitable. Remember, you are actually not paying for it at the cost, and users that actually click ads are subsidizing you.
But when it will be possible, Google is going to be in perfect position to capitalize on it.
It might be ML powered but has that power made it better? Can it actually provide you with useful relevant info without adding “site:reddit.com” to the query?
Google simply can’t monetize chatGPT-like search to the tune of $150B/year.
The current model doesn’t work for this new reality. They’ll have to find a new model. And if history is any clue, the suits will be unwilling to change
ChatGPT already far outperforms google for heavily-SEO’d topics like recipe searches.
Try asking “what herbs and spices go well in a chilli?” in both. I get a sensible, rough answer from ChatGPT within seconds. From Google I get page after page of content farms hiding information in amongst ads and life-story filler.
I wanted to demo it for my wife who was writing a paper on digital media consumption during the pandemic.
She was trying to find poems that went viral during the pandemic. Googling it showed a bunch of mediocre articles or irrelevant news stories
I asked chatGPT and it gave me a list of 10 poems by relatively well known poets. A brief review showed that these poems were, indeed, viral during the pandemic. Saved at least 15 minutes of Googling.
This is going to take a long time. Longer than one would think if one is using the progression of the language model as a basis for this prediction.
There are a lot of pitfalls and erroneous assumptions built into both Google's current search and the information used to train AI/ML models. Two big ones are "assuming that a person searching for something and accepting the answer means it's a successful search" and "assuming a person searching/asking for something actually wants what they're asking for".
I'm a librarian with several years of reference experience under my belt and neither of those things are true. They're both good tools for a well considered and well informed information search, but that 'well considered and well informed' is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Since you have domain expertise, I'd love to know your opinion on searching through "personal libraries" like Zettelkasten (or similar repositories), and perhaps linking that with Internet-scale indexes.
Are there tools that do that well right now? Do you know of (maybe niche) projects exploring such ideas?
This sounds like “Success Theater,” where everyone always reports green lights up the chain of command, until it’s too late and the show ends abruptly and poorly.
It’s a poison that seems to seep into organizations as they get larger.
I once gave a talk about “Enterprise Entrepreneurs” after being labeled as one. It can be a good approach to prevent stagnation as grass-roots initiatives often generate great ideas in large companies.
Unfortunately the practice requires executive sponsorship, which can be hard to attain if executives feel *their position and stature is being undermined by subordinates.
I’ve never understood “enterprise entrepreneurs” or “intrapreneurship” from the perspective of the employee. The massive potential upside for a success just isn’t there compared to founding your own start-up, so why do it?
The best answer I could come up with: it's not your typical employees who are going to be doing that. Employees are employees. Typically you want someone who is about to leave the company because they are bored and want to do something interesting...and they have an idea (or you give them an idea) that excites them.
So instead of VCs you invest company capital into them.
Obviously 99% of the time employees just leave and startups win the day. Which is fine. But that's basically just how it is. So you either adapt or die until the monopoly/cash cow runs its course.
Facebook turning into Meta making the 'startup' be the whole companies mission is a bold new idea, which I'm skeptical can work. But it's interesting.
The company takes the risk rather than you personally. If it fails but you maintain good relations with the rest of the company you lose nothing and just transfer elsewhere (I guess, I’ve never worked at a big company preferring to go it alone)
Less risk yes, but more importantly, for me, more stability. I can still hustle and innovate, but within the context of a full-time job where I can collect a (usually) steady paycheck.
I’m far more motivated by working on cool projects, so the reward for me is just as salient if I build something cool within someone else’s company or my own… I guess, having never done the latter.
Part of the problem is that Oculus has all the overhead from Meta’s regulatory compliance burden, so they can’t escape some of the most frustrating pressures.
Meta could have a subsidiary that does nothing but stamp out manhole covers.
That subsidiary would have a far higher compliance burden than any other manhole cover manufacturer.
Their past choices have consequences. It’s too late for them to “just not” do anything to reduce that burden.
How does this solution work? Does every team work this way? Is there no HR but only local administration? Or is it only a few teams who get this privilege? How do you avoid us vs. Them mentality in that situation?
Well most of the company still needs to keep the cash cow running. So it’s only 10% of the company at most typically. You just have to have your future bets simultaneously be taken serious and isolated from the middle management and cyclical swings of the parent company.
Often companies get excited about a new idea, staff and finance them well… then after a year or two they get thrown into the wider system and expected to survive.
Eventually they are absorbed and managed as if they are the old cash cow, needing layers of management, risk adversion, accelerated timelines, and new ‘processes’ to fix every small problem instead of focusing on the bigger picture.
> Spin "the other bets" out as a separate company.
Aha, glad somebody is seeing the same thing I'm seeing.
The problem with Google is that it is too large, and too successful. Their idea of having experimental projects is a good one, the problem is that Google makes so much money that they don't commit to them. They become too dilettante about them.
The fix is to do spin-offs, say keeping a minority stake at less than 20%. This generates capital for Google, gives them a share of the upside, but they don't have too much influence on the spin-off. So it's Death or Glory for the spin-off. They are forced to make whatever it is they invented work, or face extinction. There is a smaller management team, focussed on success.
This strikes me as a much better proposition than what we see at the moment, with Google just dabbling around pouring money into something they'll eventually get bored with.
You'd think that what with all the big brains at Google, someone would have thought of this. Maybe someone at Goldmans should make a pitch.
The issue is if they did this, what would happen is:
1) An enormous pile of cash would accumulate on Google's balance sheet.
2) The spinoffs would be subject to normal commercial rules about risk, rate of return and such.
3) The spinoffs couldn't be "brand Google." Which is a not-inconsiderable thing.
Couldn't they just be in the Google family? Like there's a startup I work adjacent to called aker BP. BP owns a 30% stake. But aker BP is a separate company that's publicly traded.
Right. Spin off a company and the spin-off now needs all those corporate functions that cause many developers to ask "What do all those people do?" It's not purely duplicative as such things scale with size to a certain degree. And it depends to some degree on how the spin off is structured but there's almost certainly a lot of incremental headcount and other expense.
I hadn't heard this this term before but I think it is pretty accurate in many organizations. Nothing is worth doing as its impossible to prove ROI conclusively - just do what the boss says instead.
There are lots of companies that entertain this solution. There are just very few examples of it working for the simple reason that this advice generally doesn't work. We look at the one company that succeeds and "say why didn't we just do that?" without remembering that there were 10 other startups that failed. The more reliable solution is to use the same wisdom of hindsight to pick winners and just buy out the one that succeeds. Facebook bought instagram, but none of their internal efforts have produced anything so useful.
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.
I've heard that before about Facebook, that there's a taboo against "cynicism".
But sometimes lack of cynicism can be disastrous. I'm reminded of a story, recounted in Francis Spufford's "Red Plenty", of Leonid Kantorovich who invented linear programming, and wrote a letter to Stalin politely suggesting he was doing economics wrong, he should do things his way instead. At the time Stalin was in his paranoid phase and had a tendency to murder anyone he noticed. Luckily for Kantorovich, a much more cynical bureaucrat intercepted the letter before Stalin could read it, and didn't pass it on.
When things are unacceptably bad, it's actually necessary to realize things are unacceptably bad, and not pretend that there's always a nice and right way out of it.
People who suppress their own doubts force others to carry their doubts for them.
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 enjoy using their products so it's not all that crazy to thing for someone to associate with. Why would anyone feel bad about making the world a more connected and open place for ~$300/hr? Hence the oppressive optimism.
Facebook is one player in a large ecosystem of workers and companies, in which things like lunch and nice offices and health insurance are simply table stakes, and total compensation levels are broadly comparable. Until recently, Facebook did pay at the upper end of that spectrum, which was some combination of their stock doing well and people souring on social media as a force for good in the world. Certainly relative to peak social media excitement ca. 2006, working there is now considered going off to be a cog in a vaguely evil faceless machine; they couldn’t get away with lowballing people the way SpaceX or even Google can.
Hedonic adaptation is real. You compare yourself to your peer group, in which there’s always people living larger than you, stocks appreciated more than yours, bought their house earlier than you, higher earning spouse than yours (or any spouse at all if you’re single), generational wealth from China, etc. And homeownership in the Bay Area is such an insatiable black hole that this kind of money merely puts you in the running. You’ll never be, like, unable to repair a household appliance - which is better than many people! - but neither are you just waltzing through life milestones in the way people think when they see these figures. You’re mostly a pass-through vehicle from your company to local property owners.
Some companies are more top down and some companies are more entrepreneurial. Amazon is famous for assigning just the right amount of work to break you before your stock vests. Apple has rigid and precise opinions about what it wants built, with engineers discouraged from scratching their own itches. Facebook on the other hand is all about initiative, with engineers being almost like Wall Street traders: come up with ideas and implement them on your own, and in your performance review we’ll check the numbers to see whether you made us money or not. Like trading, you might have a good hypothesis that just didn’t pan out, or something else outside your control might have shifted, but that’s not going to save you. You have to be right. It’s stressful! But one thing that happens in places run this way is a pretty strong social norm against trying to stop anything before it happens. If someone wants to run an AB test, however stupid it seems, they get to run it, and you have to trust in the data (and data analysis) to reveal whether it was really a good idea or not.
Practically speaking not really. The official mission is something like ‘empower people to build communities and make the world more open’.
It’s a pretty nice goal and you really have to be trying to find an objection to it that doesn’t come off as being a jerk. You can make anything political in some sense but most things just aren’t.
Yes, the atmosphere at most big tech companies is this way. Everyone writes their emails with a plastered-on fake smile.
The worst part is when people pretend that things are difficult. You can't just suggest that someone not waste time on an obviously bad idea; you must acknowledge that the team's development strategy is a complex, multifaceted governance problem, and many quarters of sync meetings will be necessary to drive the appropriate alignment with all stakeholders and establish prioritization and scheduling on an action item to form a spot committee that will deliberate on the necessity of a course correction.
It's suffocating, it produces terrible products, but it pays really well.
I'd say it's more a cultural echo of a time when it felt like anything was possible, and you were making stupid money to work on whatever you felt like working on, and everyone you interacted with was super competent and happy to help you out.
It used to be an incredibly fulfilling place to work.
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.
My problem with the movie was that it played it straight with a novel that IMO could only be enjoyed as a deliberately over the top "if this goes on" satire. The film really needed some Doctor Strangelove level black humor.
I don't know, it's a form of extrapolation IMO. The 1984 of our time. That was also not realistic back in the day but reality overtook it.
However it feels like the time of social media is already coming to an end. With the companies filling our timelines with ever more crap in a futile attempt to 'engage' us, they are only driving us ever more away.
It’s possible to deliver criticism in an optimistic way, if it’s impersonal and concrete (according to M Seligman). BTW, that’s also a standard for academic criticism. But there is a difference between allowing only optimistic criticism and banning criticism at all. That’s the problem with both tech culture and academia these days.
> 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-experts --legends in their fields-- join big companies and not find their footing.
I also don't really buy the "you gotta be good at cutthroat politics." I have plenty of examples across multiple top-tier companies, of senior leadership who were smart, thoughtful, effective... and still reasonable and compassionate.
I think it's simply that it's tough to move people, plain as that. And in Carmack's case, I will wager that his expertise and track record were not enough to get everyone to drop what they're doing and follow his lead. After all, there are many other legends at Meta too. And, there's an abundance of good ideas all fighting for limited mindshare and limited ability to act.
Carmack is an absolute genius and it would be madness to disregard anything he's spent any significant amount of time thinking about.
But let's be real, he isn't Tim Sweeny or Gabe Newell. As smart he is, I don't think he is even top 3 in the best business decision makers of his specific field of first person shooter game developers. His track record is that using his tremendous skill he caught one of the biggest waves, and he's been riding that out and catching smaller waves ever since. I don't even think he didn't see the larger subsequent waves that Sweeney and Newell saw, I think he just wasn't interested in them.
Was he interested in catching big waves for Facebook, or was he interested in pursuing his specific vision?
Doom kicked ass not because it was trying to catch big waves but because they followed their specific vision. Making shit tons of money is not everything.
Agree that Sweeney seems to be the better captain. And he left carmack in the dust with unreal.
Perhaps this is the point of criticizing 5% utilization of the gpu. Why not have 90% gpu utilization of a $400 headset? Which strategy is more likely to succeed in gaining more adoption?
>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.
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 damn. I worked with a lot of people that were more than decent in their careers, but dropped the ball completely in the last 5 to 10 years before retirement with huge negative impact for their employers. How can this happen? In big companies the inertia covers for these people.
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 engineers, but they were very good at inspiring other engineers.
I think this is where Steve Jobs actually deserves a lot of credit, and honestly Elon Musk too.
While I agree with the idea, I think John Carmack illustrated he was capable as more than an IC but also a team leader for several projects while at Id.
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.
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 bureaucracy this way, then it's folly for me to try the same. I should accept that we're playing checkers not chess.
Carmack is famous externally, especially among a generation that grew up with Doom/Quake. But it isn't like Facebook employs a bunch of ordinary engineers and then Carmack. There are a lot of people with extraordinarily impressive resumes and a long history of massive technical success there. It is not a surprise to me that it didn't just become the "do what Carmack says" show when he joined. Consensus-building becomes even harder at larger institutions.
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 I think are much too cavalier about bugs and compatibility, and I think some of the design details are insane (I dislike the binary logs, for example), but those are details, not big issues."
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.
How could Linus have rejected a systemd feature, even one he didn't like?
Linus runs the kernel. systemd is not the kernel. They're completely different projects.
Yes, systemd runs on Linux (exclusively so) but Linus doesn't magically get veto power over separate Linux-only projects just because they run on Linux.
Heck, even if Linux weren't Free Software, and was proprietary like the Windows kernel, he still wouldn't be able to tell other people what they could and could not build on top of Linux, just like Microsoft can't tell people what to put in their Windows apps. The fact that Linux is Free Software makes the idea even weirder.
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.
> commonly there simply isn't a productive way to walk the line
I think that sums up the problem of institutional dynamics and
individual talent rather well. For people with strong work ethics,
sense of duty and genuine creative optimism, it's very painful to sit
in a room of avoidant, grinning suits being superficially nice to one
another wasting time trying to find "clever" reasons not to do
anything. The whole show is a cloying deadlock. It's squandering human
intelligence and life opportunities. I can't be witness to that
tragedy and no remuneration, however many zeros you add, can make it
worthwhile.
> 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.
Decision making credibility is simply not anchored in "being logically correct."
It's anchored in the ability to consider the needs of the tribe appropriately.
Leadership credibility in human society is mostly anchored via your track record of emphasizing with the needs of a Dunbar's number sized tribe.
Empathy, not logic, is the KPI our brains are tuned to. Empathetic leaders emphasize data collection, logical ones make decisions using that data. Evolution has optimized for empathy.
The core problem with large companies is the middle management buffer grows large enough that it forms a subculture which drives decision making.
Plus, institutions of 1,000, 5,000, 10,000, all have their "local" rules of detailed management
know-how. Add it all up, and you have a problem that's just as thorny & knotty as any engineering problem. Requiring just as much detailed expertise.
In any large company, everything is so complex and connected with each other that it's close to impossible to hash out the actual output (positive or negative) of any big decision. So, decisions are not based on merit because it's impossible to reason what is good what is not. Instead, there's a leader who has some kind of vision and the company follows that vision, for better or worse.
> If John fucking Carmack cannot move the bureaucracy this way
My read is its not so much the bureaucracy of project managers or paperwork as it is junior executives trying to 'leave their mark', defend their turf, etc.
What makes you think Carmack is especially persuasive? Often, those with the best technical chops are the least persuasive and it seems misguided to think that the reason you can't persuade is because you are lacking technically.
Yeah. I feel like this a lot. I don't know if it's a bias of some kind but it feels right.
I suppose it's selection bias. I don't know how to market, but apparently the marketing people do because we have customers. I do know about my corner of the system though, and when my advice is ignored it usually turns out I was right in the end.
At MegaCompanies, being right, having evidence, and trying to persuade just isn’t enough, as John Fucking Carmack figured out. It’s more like High School. You need to be in the right clique or have the ear of the right Very Important Person.
When you send that E-mail and say “We should do X because Y and Z…” people stop reading at “because” and just go look in the company directory for your name. If you’re high enough on the totem pole, they’ll respond to you. If you’re even higher, they might suggest a meeting to discuss X! And if you are really high up, they will stop what they are doing and do X right away.
What’s surprising to me is how someone like Carmack didn’t have enough totem-pole clout just from who he is! He’s practically a celebrity, and I’d have thought that would go a long way in the High School Drama Club but I guess not.
That didn't seem to be the implication. Carmacks name carries weight, and we're talking about navigating beurocracy and politics. My own thoughts and opinions tell me that they don't matter in those two domains
Oh they do. Leaders/execs will take note of enough people voicing something in common, assuming those opinions have passed counter-arguments/tests/discussions of sorts.
Carmack is only one guy. Maybe his voice might be worth a little more, but your voice also matters, so don't be so quick to despair.
This is why there are so many leaks from Facebook. My sister is a reporter and she says that people leak when they feel they can't influence the decision of the org, that they are a Cassandra who is being ignored by the organization. That there is so much leaking from Facebook- much of it from seemingly senior and highly respected people- suggests major problems in the decision making process there.
Facebook leans into making everyone feel like their opinions matters: "Nothing at Facebook is someone else's problem". But not everyone can be right, so of course you end up with people being ignored and feeling shirty.
At other companies I've worked at the norm is that the rank and file feel powerless, and it doesn't even occur to them to offer their opinion.
> This was admittedly self-inflicted – I could have moved to Menlo Park after the Oculus acquisition and tried to wage battles with generations of leadership, but I was busy programming, and I assumed I would hate it, be bad at it, and probably lose anyway.
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.
I see it more as the simple truth. There's only so much influence you can wield working one day a week as an executive advisor. By his own admission he could have steered things better if he'd been more involved, but he didn't want to be more involved. He's got his own startup to work on.
Oh yeah I was assuming we were talking about when he was actually working there. That whole consulting gig felt like a slow quit.
> By his own admission he could have steered things better if he'd been more involved
My reading is that back when he was full time, he was busy with actual product work and coding, and he could have possibly made a difference by going political, but there would have been no guarantee and it would have taken a lot of his time.
It only seems universal because the management universe has ben captured by the MBAs. All upper management feels the same way because they were all largely trained at the same few MBA schools.
I don't see that distinction mattering all that much. What matters is that people with a specific mindset come out of these MBA schools that also have formed strong networks there which help them win the power and status games later on.
Reckon the cost of doing an MBA has a big role to play in this. MBAs are just stupid expensive. If you’re 200k in debt at graduation, you’re likely going to make conservative choices in your career.
Siding with the in-group and perpetuating the bureaucratic structure is one way to ensure that you stay employed.
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.
I think we can only speculate about reasons, so everybody is gonna project. Maybe the Facebook culture is uniquely bad. Maybe Carmack isn't an effective leader. Maybe it's just how large corporations work. Maybe he was dealt a bad hand.
Meanwhile, I admire that he had the guts to see the issue, say it out loud in a self-critical way, and call it quits. Most people don't.
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.
I don’t think it’s specific to failing orgs. I doubt technical skill is what gets you to the top at Goldman Sachs, LVMH, VW, the US government, or any other incredibly successful organization. At a certain point of scale, any organization is about politics
Politics isn't necessarily some dirty thought-terminating cliche. It did used to have an actual meaning:
>the activities associated with the governance of a country or other area, especially the debate or conflict among individuals or parties having or hoping to achieve power.
As long as you work with people, you will have to engage in some politics. But I guess another definition has become the more popular lately:
>activities within an organization that are aimed at improving someone's status or position and are typically considered to be devious or divisive.
Politics or "people who don't know what they are doing doubling down on decisions or lack thereof and others aligning themselves because they are busy doing stuff and rocking the boat isn't useful unless you have time, mandate and mindshare enough to coordinate with others".
I have a genuine question about what to do when one finds oneself in this type of position and one is surrounded by people who seemingly do give a damn (and one isn't compelled to just give up and leave).
In my experience, the software industry, in it’s aggressive desire to be egalitarian, has an authority problem. I have encountered the “I told you so one year ago but we just had to learn the hard way didn't we” situation more times than it seems efficient. I am not unaware that I may be selectively remembering things and I’m not so prideful to ignore that I’ve also made calls that turn out to need adjusting down the road… but it baffles me why people put in positions of power and leadership are so often ignored almost on the whim of some well meaning but misguided other party. Certainly Carmack has the industry respect to be taken seriously. Why wasn’t he?
I want to write about this topic in more depth, but in a nutshell I found that the more innovative and valuable your idea is, the harder it is to sell (because it's very value comes from the fact that it's a distance from bow people are thinking today)
People are busy and attention is scarce so knowing how to genuinely push and sell your idea in such environments is a rare ability and one that needs curation.
You'll find that people who rise are ones who can do this.
You also have to be ruthless as required and not take no for an answer. Sometimes you have to run people over and leave the bodies in the ditch to get stuff done.
And two years later, your idea fails and your boss says:
> 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.
So serious point: if everyone is ruthless and tries to push their own ideas through, how can a manager know who is right and which direction to follow?
It doesn’t even have to be innovative in a global sense. Just making suggestions that are outside the experience of the people you need to convince can become futile.
Egotistical people with power are more than happy to ignore maths and rationality. I don’t know why. It never works out for them and it brings everyone else down. It’s very frustrating.
The slightly less boring answer: some people don't necessarily have the audience's best interests at heart. Sometimes not even the company's best interests. To use a slightly less heinous example than some of the obviously malicious backstabbing: maybe you do know that Idea B is more efficient, but Idea A was yours, and it looks great on a resume to say that you achitected Idea A, that is being used in production (even if it made the company less money and the product worse off). You're gonna leave the company in 3 years anyway, so why care about some efficiency? Why even care if 6 years down the line someone else comes in and cleans up the code and ends up using Idea B in the end? You got your value out of it.
Slghtly less boring answer 2: people aren't perfect. And attach to the smallest fixations. So they fight not because the idea is bad but because their goal is to spite that particular person. You just need to be more discrete about it than back in grade school. This example was a person, but it can be extended to a group, a company, even an idealogy as a whole. Be it in zealous defense or in spite of, it has a similar effect on productivity.
> Certainly Carmack has the industry respect to be taken seriously. Why wasn’t he?
I wonder if his schedule played some part. He worked there for one day a week. I could see it being really difficult to understand his vision if you have to wait 7 days to ask a follow-up*, for example. And it's gotta be close to impossible to move the needle on existing culture if you're barely around.
* and while you wait there are plenty of other people around to ask instead
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 cleaned in the first place. When I realize that's what I'm doing - when it's most or all of what I'm doing - I leave. Sounds like John might have similar boundaries, and found himself standing at the edge of one.
I'd really like to see him try his own thing again, and either not sell it this time or be quite a bit more precious about what he's willing to part with and for how many zeroes.
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.
> 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.
I'd be very careful about making that assertion when you're only hearing one side of the story. There is a good quote from the Dowager Countess in Downton Abbey about why she never takes sides in a broken marriage: "Because however much the couple may strive to be honest, no one is ever in possession of the facts."
>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.
I so wish I could "kill stupid things before they cause damage", "set direction" and have people follow, but it seems especially difficult for technical people.
We spend all-day every-day talking to our subservient (a compiler) but a human is fuzzy and unreliable which is compounded by team size. Carmack can realize something in an instant but it is amazing how long it can take an entire team.
One thing I've noticed that really does not work is "complaining", if Carmack thinks he is complaining, then magnify that by 10 for others on the team.
Rather than attacking an idea directly, I'm wondering if ignoring the idea may be more effective. This way there's no one to fight and the idea can slip away without any ego or drama, there's no face to lose.
If you really can't help the situation, then leaving is the last resort. Oh well, on to the next thing, very curious to see what Carmack gets into next.
It's very confusing that a company by that name [1] seems to exist already, in an adjacent/near area ("Keen Technologies Pvt Ltd. is a comprehensive repository for online courses offering high quality state-of-the-art IT and Business related e-learning and training related courses.").
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
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 technology.
But I'm glad Carmack surely refilled the piggy bank in the process. I look forward to seeing what he manages to do free of the FB/Meta albatross with gas in the tank.
It's confusing because the recent Doom games were developed by Id and published by Bethesda Softworks, and both of them are subsidiaries of Zenimax. Bethesda Softworks is just a publisher; the games Bethesda is best known for (The Elder Scrolls and Fallout 3+) are by Bethesda Game Studios.
That's what it looks like from the outside, but the reality is that he works alongside people at the same level as him as far as the company is concerned. His experience is incredible but its likely that the people he works with are also deeply experienced engineering managers too. He's just more famous.
I don't work at Meta, but I assume that, like any other bureaucracy
It's a large company, with home-grown political feifdoms - and technical merits for ideas aren't good enough to get things your way. Even if he is a big cheese in the world of actually knowing things, that doesn't really matter to his executive peers.
You need to both know things, and be very good at politicking to be successful.
(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.
Can people not see the big flashing warning lights of his attitude right there in his faux self deprecating comment? When one talks about killing 'stupid things', that's actually a colleague's initiative, or possibly some project in flight, with a team of people working on it. People putting in blood sweat and tears. Not everyone in the organisation gets to choose what they are working on. For us adults in the room, who have worked our entire careers treating our colleagues with respect, this is not how you effect change in an organisation. Sure, privately one may think this or that is stupid, but you don't go around using that language. It just offsides people. To bring change you need to bring people with you.
I mean the guy came up in the gaming industry, which by many reports is somewhere on the spectrum between techbro dominated monoculture (not unlike this forum), through to just abusive of its employees, so his bar is very low. And yes I know he was brilliant, but there's no special rules for him because he made Quake run fast.
At the level he was brought on, something more than technical skills were required. He failed.
I'm as shocked as you are. What a wasted opportunity by petty people with big egos. And I paid for it literally. I bought a Oculus set and stopped using soon after. What a disappointment. I wanted to support the technology, but my good will was squandered. At least I feel vindicated by every thing John Carmack says because I thought some similar things.
Idk I feel like Carmack is a genius, and has done genius tech related things at id. But does he really have credentials to speak on latest modern developments in technology?
Does he have any skin in the game? Last I heard of him was Megatexturing in idtech 5 and that wasn't really a huge marvel nor necessarily did it make the engine the forefront of game tech.
It's interesting to me that, even here where people pride themselves on their intellectual and rational superiority, we can still observe the primitive human tendency to appeal to authority; see the top throwaway comment [1].
His internal badge (ie. goodbye) post. This is definitely not in the article.
Edit: The article has a link to some other paywalled link that may contain the full contents of the note. I don't have a subscription so I can't tell but the quote is real at least.
It's only stunning because programmers view him as a god, when in reality, he is a just a fallible human being. Just goes to show even programmers are susceptible to idolism.
The signs were all there. He entered a den where he doesn't hold founder status anymore, and that the value of his contributions to the company does not hold as much weight.
If so, then they missed the games that used id Tech 4 and id Tech 5 (almost impossible given the success of Doom 3), and how Carmack continued to invent truly unthinkable performance and fidelity enhancements to real time 3D graphics until the day he left for Occulus.
Then at Occulus he translated that engineering talent into a ruthless attack on latency and other issues with VR at the time. He was even working on this before he left.
Anyone who has watched one of his QuakeCon Keynotes in the past 20 years knows just how much raw talent Carmack has as an engineer. Most of them are on YouTube, you should check them out.
I think this also sums up his weakness though in a megacorp like Meta. He's technically brilliant, and that can go a very long way. But in a large corporation, technical brilliance is secondary to excellence in leadership.
I remember reading an article in the '00s or '90s about how Id worked, and it just seemed not very scalable beyond Carmack.
And while he his companies have had great success, other '90s era peers - Valve and Epic - are on a whole other level today. Technical brilliance brought his company far, but it can't bring you to those heights.
The man went from making the fastest 3D games ever to grace silicon to literally launching rockets. He's been the fastest nerd alive, and Meta couldn't even give him legs (figuratively and literally [1])
“Beware an old man in a profession where men die young”
I am in my late 20s, and I think there’s plenty to learn from the past that still applies to the world of today. When a seasoned veteran says something, I shut up and listen, because there’s often a learnable tidbit there, or at least a fun war story.
Which is why I said “part of being young.” That said, I don’t remember being so explicitly mad at previous generations when I grew up (as a millennial). “Ok boomer” is a big part of the gen z vocabulary.
I've seen it used by both millenials and zoomers, mostly directed at boomers. It captures a general sentiment that is widespread among those generations that the boomer generation uses (or used existing) systems of power to benefit themselves to the detriment of younger generations and then complains as the younger generations struggle to earn their place in those systems.
What makes you say that? Certainly tiktok seems to be full of a lot of generational humor/videos, which must explicitly naming boomers and often showing people their age. But maybe I’m too old to understand their explicit gripes.
Meta itself only exists because of poor direction. It is an aberration of humanity. If good counsel and advice were important to Meta, it would shut down on itself because its very existence is an offence to common sense.
"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 reviews and rip stupid features to shreds, with accurate estimates of what they'd cost in terms of headcount and project delays. He was probably the most valuable member of the team because he was respected enough that his objections kept the project focused and on scope, and it was a 20% project for him.
> You don't get rewarded for preventing bad things.
A few years ago I saw a promotion announcement e-mail come into my inbox for a colleague who sat a few steps from my desk. It was filled with the usual "did this, did that, made an impact, etc." statements but it also had a large section dedicated to the analysis this employee performed and presented to kill a huge initiative before the organization rolled it out. The initiative was very innovative but it ultimately wouldn't have achieved its goals. It was encouraging to see this in a promotion announcement and indicated to me that some organizations do explicitly reward for preventing bad things.
Might be an exception that proves the rule. Killing a major initiative might’ve been a boon for sibling initiatives m — no wonder those leads applaud an underling who usefully twisted the knife. Politics — is Amazon known for it?…
That’s not what exception that proves the rule means. “Parking allowed only on Tuesdays” is an exception that proves the rule. This is just an exception that disproves the rule, like most exceptions.
My experience matches with the GP. In my ~20-year professional life, I can't recall even one instance when I'd read a promotion announcement and saw that one of the person's accomplishments was that they prevented something bad from happening. Sure, it's possible I'm forgetting, but such a thing seems odd enough to me that it feels like something I'd notice and remember. I expect most people will have a similar experience.
It's also possible that people are getting praise for these sorts of "negative accomplishments" in private, or on performance reviews. Which is better than nothing, but I think it's still valuable and healthy to remind people that part of the job isn't just building stuff, it's also making sure the right things get built. And public praise for killing bad things is a good way to do that.
I've never seen it either but that's irrelevant. The original guy talked about someone blocking a crap project with good results. That's a positive.
So someone responds by assuming it's a negative: "...applaud an underling who usefully twisted the knife". I mean maybe, but quite possibly maybe not. But some people seem wired to find the worst.
It's a save-the-budget kind of thing. By showing that we don't need X or can delay buying Y for 1 year, saved the company from $ZZ million dollars of spend. It might not be stopping other people from working, but it is praised.
You can, but only in the long run, and only if you’re saying “yes” to good things too. We’ve all probably worked with someone who just says no to everything and manages to kill both good ideas and bad. That leads to stagnation, which can be even worse than trying and failing at a bunch of different ideas.
I got top marks in 2021 based on feedback from two high level managers because I "prevented a year of wasted engineer with with a comment on a Google doc". Those marks lead to a nice pay bump.
It really depends on the size of the org and the team dynamics.
In a small startup with a fairly high degree of trust and emotional safety your CEO is more likely to notice that you prevented damage/loss by saying no.
A large org where so much is lost due to the telefone game, misaligned goals, hierarchy and increased complexity is not an environment where this is (usually) noticed or appreciated.
That's generally the case. It's soul-sucking to work when you can't prevent idiocy and at most places you're punished for pushing back hard, so the only response (other than, you know, burn-out) is to leave.
When you see senior people you respect getting the hell out for no obvious reason, that's usually a sign that you should be polishing your resume. Bad times are coming.
In fact, you might feel like a hero for needing to put in OT to put out a garbage fire! Never mind that it shouldn't have happened in the first place...
> You don't get rewarded for preventing bad things.
This is the source of so many problems at large companies. The employees part of the day to the day understand how much of a positive impact this has but the people in charge of the cash don't see that.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease, or the new product launch gets the promotion.
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.
> I’ve also seen morale being slowly killed by people who _thought_ they were doing this, but were _actually_ just argumentative defeatists.
Yes, I've also seen this as well. At some point you need people who will go off on a limb and do something crazy. I've seen in multiple times in my career. In particular I remember an architect who'd ruthlessly attempt to take scope out of projects but while we was in charge, we were nearly never innovating. Just delivering features on time and budget. Existing customers were always delighted but we had a hard time reaching new markets.
After he left, there's been a fair bit of projects that "didn't work" but there's been a couple of absolute home runs that would've never gotten off the ground because they were pretty wild.
There's I've heard a few times that resonates with me and I reiterate to all senior engineers I work with when they get into conflicts. "It takes all kinds of people to make a great company" You need dreamers, the people who worry about the money, cold and calculating execute at all costs types and folks and the folks who are happy to toil in a small but critical corner of a massive system to keep the lights on.
In my experience you can get into trouble when you try to play multiple roles at the same time because it's mentally exhausting trying to to do things like sell a vision while being the person trying to keep the economics of the thing from completely falling apart.
This is true. I think a good test for this is that the person making the criticisms also provides alternatives that are reasonable and it's evident that they're trying to make things better and not just arguing for argument's sake.
Definitely depends on the person. The amount of projects I’ve worked on that were dismissed by such people done anyway and invariably became the saving of the team/org/company is laughable. These always took longer as they were under resourced and the people working on it did because of belief not because it was good for their status in the company. The hallmark of these is the last minute surge in resourcing when management figures out they got it wrong. Sometimes I think it’s almost like they bought an option on saving themselves by badly resourcing something at the start.
> The amount of projects I’ve worked on that were dismissed by such people done anyway and invariably became the saving of the team/org/company is laughable.
That's intriguing. I would love some examples of these projects / products.
> The hallmark of these is the last minute surge in resourcing when management figures out they got it wrong.
Got what wrong? That they've heard the yeas and nays and chosen to undertake the project sounds like mang got something right?
> That's intriguing. I would love some examples of these projects / products.
It's literally the definition of skunkworks projects. Many companies have been saved by a small few ignoring all the "Nos" and just doing what they believe in at personal risk.
I really disagree with the general notion of people saying No. This is actually, imo, the death of big companies and very common. It is not heroic to say no, it is maintaining the status quo. People who talk about such things with glowing eyes probably have spent their careers only at big companies.
Experienced people tend to have narrow vision and will shoot down ideas because they can't think outside of their worldview. That's why new ideas are so rarely born at large orgs. And the most innovation tends to come out of scrappy startups from kids who don't know that what they're doing is impossible.
Good question hard to bake all the context in. The area I have worked most in is operations where a technique/widget/process is needed to fix a problem present within the environment due to an external actor which otherwise couldn’t be identified/monitored/resolved. Also to clarify I’ve been lucky to be part of such skunk work projects never actually lead one.
Switching between business and academia several times I am really struck by this.
Meetings where the elephant in the room is not mentioned, because nobody wants to loose face. Really bad practice not commented on because (I guess, I am bad at this) some form of "mutually assured destruction". I will not point out your mistakes so you do not point out mine.
That, in case you are wondering, is from business.
I am really pleased to see people commenting here about business experience that go against my experience. And in my little group (of two, we could easily be five) we are straight with each other. But in the wider group? Rank incompetence, and dreadful mistakes that could be corrected if someone would point it out.
The point is technical excellence, good scientific practice, that is not required for being successful at business. It is al about "people skills". I.e. convincing somebody that they got what they were promised when they did not.
The university system in my country (Aotearoa) has been hobbled by people with business fetish. The meme was in the 1990s that "business is the most efficient". I believed it, until I saw the waste, inefficiency, downright lying and dishonesty, aghh I am triggered, that is business.
The same thing happens to some degree in academia (especially in commerce. My academic experience is science in the 1990s and commerce in the 2010s) but only "some degree". I see it at every nearly business meeting I attend.
I said before, I will say again, how pleasing it is to see comments here from people with different experiences than me.
These dumb things emerge because of two forces: first, the promotion game of people trying to get theirs. Second, price's law.
Price's law is what constrains scope, and the boundary between engineers can often be the luck of having the right opportunity. As such, all the stupid things emerge trying to invent scope. I'm guilty of this, but that was the game.
There is no solution except accept that big companies kind of suck and are slow.
Maybe I am unusually lucky. After managing a small team for a year in a FAANG, I am considerably less jaded.
I think it is entirely possible to be truly focused on the customer, to have a vision and a strategy, and to balance working toward this goal with experimentation.
It is of course also very hard work, it’s easy to make mistakes, and nothing is perfect. But I really don’t see that this is all doomed from the beginning just because of bad incentives and structural forces.
If your leadership chain is good, then it is easy to have a great experience and good scope to grow.
As you get higher up, the politics and limits become very visible. Strategy and focus are really hard to scale up which creates limited scope for continued growth.
This sounds familiar. It's usually when I've decided to resign in a few months because thing don't change that I start not giving a fuck and actually enacting change. I wonder how to break that cycle.
It might sound easy to "just don't give a fuck sooner" but it's exhausting. The constant uphill struggle is not something I want to live with.
One of my favourite board games is called Burn Rate. The premise is a parody of silicon valley during the boom. You compete with the other players for talent (each employee is a card, with varying skill levels).
You could slow down other players by attacking them with “bad idea” cards that would tie up one or more of their engineers for an amount of time. To defend against bad ideas, you need a good manager (one type of employee card).
I could be misremembering some of the details, but the wisdom of the above game mechanic has stuck with me :)
As a counterpoint, this does add to Google's already established reputation of not shipping stuff. "No men" are generally a bad idea, they kill innovation and slow things down.
Big orgs reward stupid BAs for coming up with “exciting looking stuff” and the most engineers gladly take it up their az and all would say yeah we can do this like it would make them look bad if they said otherwise. The ones that speak up would usually get grilled and questioned like their job was on the line.
He just founded a new company called Keen Technologies to work on AGI. Not surprising that he wants to focus on that now. He's been part-time at Meta for years. I'm interested to find out what kind of business model he's planning for an AGI company.
> As anyone who listens to my unscripted Connect talks knows, I have always been pretty frustrated with how things get done at FB/Meta. Everything necessary for spectacular success is right there, but it doesn't get put together effectively.
> I thought that the "derivative of delivered value" was positive in 2021, but that it turned negative in 2022. There are good reasons to believe that it just edged back into positive territory again, but there is a notable gap between Mark Zuckerberg and I on various strategic issues, so I knew it would be extra frustrating to keep pushing my viewpoint internally. I am all in on building AGI at Keen Technologies now.
It's very interesting to me that he's giving up on VR entirely. If he thought it was just an issue with Facebook, presumably he'd jump in somewhere else and get the impact he was looking to have.
That's another sign to me that VR is once again not going anywhere. Or rather, half of it isn't. Oculus-style VR is two best in one: 3D persistent virtual worlds and stereoscopic facehugger interfaces. The former has had great success, mostly in games, but the latter has spent decades as the thing that people are supposed to want but don't actually use much when they get the chance.
They are actually permissable in circumstances similar to John Carmack's:
> California employers can sidestep non-competes in the following instances:
> EXCEPTION 1: If the employee sells business goodwill
> EXCEPTION 2: If the owner sells his or her business interests
> EXCEPTION 3: If the owner sells all operating and goodwill assets
> Upon the business’ dissolution, a member of the company may agree to a non-compete if operating a similar business in the geographic area. Goodwill is the company’s name and brand reputation. Employees with stock options are not considered company owners for purposes of non-competition agreements.
I think it's less of a judgement about VR and more of a judgement about AI. If you believe AGI is within reach (as he does and I agree), working on literally anything else seems like a waste of time. It's impossible to overstate the impact it will have.
Wouldn't be surprised if SD, GPT-3, and other recent releases were what pushed him over the edge and prompted him to leave. He must have felt like he was watching a lot of cool things happen without him.
If I had another 30 IQ points I'd be climbing over walls and sneaking into buildings at night to work on this stuff.
I believe he talked about starting work on AGI at the time he went part-time at Meta, long before GPT-3.
I encourage anyone to try out some AI related stuff, genius IQ not required. It's still a young field so there aren't yet huge towers of knowledge to climb before you can do anything. The core ideas are actually super simple, requiring nothing more than high school math.
The hardware is fairly accessible. You can start for free with Colab, try a subscription for $9.99/mo, or use the gaming PC you might already have. The hardest thing is data, but again there are lots of free datasets available as well as pretrained models you can fine-tune on a custom smaller dataset that you make yourself.
Andrew Ng's online courses are great to get your feet wet. You use Octave/Matlab to implement the basics of many machine learning models from scratch, and build yourself up to using python to design several popular deep learning models including convolutional and transformers. It's not required, but a good idea to understand at least the basics of linear algebra and calculus.
Interesting. To be honest I really appreciated how they started with Matlab; it gave a very math-centric focus to the fundamentals, although of course you can do all of that with Python too. And I say this as a professional developer.
FastAI gets recommended a lot I think, if you can already code - focuses on hacking with frameworks instead of starting with the boring linear algebra stuff.
> That's another sign to me that VR is once again not going anywhere
That's not Carmack's opinion. To quote from his post:
"Despite all the complaints I have about our software, millions of people are still getting value out of it. We have a good product. It is successful, and successful products make the world a better place."
"the fight is still winnable! VR can bring value to most of the people in the world"
The main problem with VR in my opinion is a lack of software. Most of the games produced have been either toys that are little more than a tech demo, or ports of other games not designed around VR. There haven't been many serious attempts to harness VR for non-game playing purposes.
I think the future is still bright for VR. We're currently in a bit of a local hype-cycle trough, but the tech is only going to improve.
When people say one thing with their words and another with their actions, I tend to believe the actions. And "we made cool hardware that doesn't have much practical use" is not the most ringing of endorsements.
Also suspicious to me is the way that Meta still isn't releasing actual use statistics. They're happy to release DAU numbers for Facebook. Where are the equivalent numbers for Oculus? What Carmack says is consistent with my suspicion that a lot of people bought the Quest to try it but don't use it regularly. Which would explain why they keep those numbers very quiet.
The main problem with VR is that it is a gimmick that people don't want to use as their main medium of interaction whether with games or job communication.
I see you're getting downvoted, but that's my suspicion as well. Since the 1850s, stereoscopic 3D has had many waves of short-term popularity but has produced no lasting impact. From the Brewster Stereoscope to the Viewmaster to multiple tries at 3D movies and TV, to 30 years of "VR will break out once we improve the tech", each time people get very excited about the novelty and think it will change the world. And each time it doesn't.
The simple answer here is that people's brain hardware is already quite good at turning flat 2D representations into 3D mental experiences, so stereoscopy doesn't add much. Making it, as you say, a gimmick. The historically cyclical interest in the gimmick suggests that it's mainly appealing as a novelty.
His goal is artificial general intelligence, something that seemed to grab his attention after he was already actively working on VR. My guess is that when he started teaching himself machine learning, he realized that he needed to focus all his attention on it if he was going to take it seriously. Facebook's failings just accelerated this for him.
I think the truth is that VR is there. They've sold lots of headsets and people who love it, really love it. Expecting it to sell at iPhone levels was never going to happen.
So by "there" you mean that the tech is good enough to provide a good experience, and so they've basically plateaued? That's my guess too. I rented a Quest for a couple of weeks and it was pretty neat. It just didn't fill any needs we actually had. I was thinking of it as a try-before-I-buy situation, but when I sent it back at the end of the two weeks, nobody cared. The kids were already back on their Switches and the Playstation for gaming.
Yeah, that's pretty much what I mean. They aren't some new thing that either has to launch into orbit or crash and burn. The likely path is in between.
VR headsets have improved immensely since I first tried it in 1991 (Dactyl Nightmare) and I suspect they will keep improving. Where we are at today is not necessarily a plateau but it might feel like one if you were expecting a growth curve that looks like a hockey stick.
Try it yourself. Strap something 8 hours or longer around your head, don't move, because every small tremor distorts the vision of the device.
VR in its current form is eye cocaine, nothing more. Why watch poppy avatars hop around in a virtual reality, while you are bound to do nothing?
In every way, VR should be restricted to very few use cases, not to - hello Zuck - rebuild reality completely and hereby track everything you do or see to deliver even more addictive material to your eye vision.
It sounds cool, some use cases look cool, but the very fact that hardly anyone at Meta uses their own device/creature, speaks volumes. I am glad, JC takes consequences and abandons this experiment.
Don't move? Have you ever played Superhot VR or Beat Sabre or Pistol Whip or... etc.? You're jumping around all over the place for some VR games and it's extremely fun and the experience can't be reproduced on a monitor.
I only use Abe for fitness apps about 1 hour a day and frankly the weight isn’t a problem for that period of time with intense movements.
In fact I think the other use cases are bogus, everything else is unimpressive to me except the ability to have a decent fitness experience with FitXR or Beatsaber.
Or maybe you know he is simply a lot more excited about AI than VR now and that's it. No need to stick with something that doesn't excite you any more just because you were excited about it at one point and spent several years working on it :-)
I suspect he's going to get smacked hard by the AGI problem and ultimately concede defeat on his biggest goal while achieving some success in the current less-than-general ML stuff.
If you solve a few more problems with chatgpt it's going to become useful enough that people are going to stop caring so much about the AGI label. It's going to quack like a duck enough to change a lot of industries.
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 particularly useful.
I'd certainly love to have a useful AI but I think we're experiencing a 80-20 rule situation right now, and that it'll be a few years before we see anything that makes significant improvements on current solutions.
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.
I think you’re exaggerating quite a bit. Language models have been evolving for years.
The problem I have with GPT is that is wonderful at confidently writing things that are completely incorrect. It works wonderfully at generating fluff.
I’m not a pessimist I love this kind of thing. I just understand the delta between impressive demo and real useful product. It’s why self driving still isn’t pervasive in our lives after being right around the corner for the better part of a decade.
Maybe you think it's a revolution but older folk see that as an evolution.
It remind me of the alice bot hype of my youth, which in retrospect was just an evolution fromthe ELIZA hype of 1966.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
We are actually far from sci-fi where is my flying delorean and clean fusion energy for humankind? An as far as AI is concerned where is HAL 9000?
This once again represents a sentence which omits a lot of important details.
This happened in an experimental setting, not an actual production setting. It was a net positive energy output when ONLY accounting for the energy input of the actual lasers, not when accounting for the mechanisms which fired the lasers (which had an energy efficiency of about 1%, although this efficiency could be higher if they used more advanced laser generator/whatnots). It was generated in a way that in no way resembles what current attempts at a production ready, maintainable, fusion reactor look like (tokamaks), and was instead, as stated before, essentially a design meant for experiments where fusion occurred (basically by shooting a pellet of fusion material into the central focus of a bunch of powerful lasers).
The LLNL is, and always has been, a experimental laboratory meant for primarily nuclear weapons testing and maintenance, and as such, have the ability to test nuclear fusion (via this inertial confinement setup), as fusion occurs in thermonuclear bombs, of which the US certainly has many in its stockpile.
This test, while a big "milestone", is the equivalent of building a specialized fuel efficient vehicle which gets 500 miles to the gallon by sacrificing almost everything that makes a car a car, and then equating that as to say that every car on the road will be getting 500 miles to the gallon any day now. When in fact, the only thing achieved was the ability to say that we've made a car get 500 miles to the gallon.
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.
Buddy, it’s not a demo, it’s a warning of what’s to come.
Stay behind, it makes no difference to anyone but yourself. As for me, I have integrated ChatGPT into my daily work. I have used it to write emails that negotiated a 30k usd deal, write stories, prototype an app, send a legal threat, brainstorm name and branding ideas, scope a potential market and this is just some of the stuff I used for actual productive work.
I can’t begin to tell you how much I have played with it for fun and intellectual curiosity.
No. "AI" isn't creating new information complexity. (In fact it's making the world simpler, by regurgitating smooth-sounding statistically average statements.)
Information complexity is the true test of intelligence, and the current crop of "AI" is actually making computing dumber, not smarter.
But yes, "dumber" is often more useful. But the industries "AI" will revolutionize are the kinds of industries where "dumber" is more profitable (e.g., copywriting spam, internet pornography, casual games, etc.) so the world will be poorer for it.
The first iPhone forever changed how people use and perceive smartphones as well as how they are built. It only sold 6 million units over the course of 13 months, an average of 15k units / day.
I too can pull up completely irrelevant statistics.
I'm not sure I understand. TapWaterBandit asked for a fairly specific example of something and I gave one. Could you elaborate on what your disagreement is?
i want to see the actual use cases for these less than perfect AIs. only recently they've become useful enough to actually assist with coding, which is indeed impressive, but what else can they really do?
they can answer questions, yes, but it's tough to tell if it's telling the truth or making stuff up which is kind of a problem. code at least compiles or doesn't so its easy to verify.
I also think he's going to lose it massively (technical background aside, i.e. he's not an applied mathematician, it's a huge problem) BUT the AI industry is currently run with a very childish approach to software and programming, if his company can attack the infrastructure wisely they could really improve the industry. No idea how to make that money money though.
Honestly seems like a better fit for him than VR. VR may be games, but everyone is saying his strengths are technical, not organizational. Seems like he wants to work on hard technical problems and thats what he's good at.
I believe we're still 15 years out from AGI, but I also think we could start creating autonomous agents right now that make people feel like it's almost AGI. I think Carmack could get something out the door that feels like that.
This is something I think will break the mystique around Carmack. Back in the 1990s and early 2000s he was considered the whiz kid when it came to rendering engines but in reality something that's as nuanced and still not fully understood (intelligence, especially AGI) is likely too far out of his expertise to develop. Why? Because the last 60 or so years of development in the field hasn't yield much in the way of results in pure research or practical application. Machine learning and other hat tricks aren't even in the realm of AI properly but rather probability models that work well enough on a narrow set of problems to possibly commercialize them (ex. chat bots for help desk replacements). The thought that anyone, and I mean anyone, is going to develop artificial general intelligence before the 2050s or even later is to me laughable. We barely can understand how to talk to parts of our own brains, we're still learning more from other so-called lower lifeforms with respect to how they solve problems (fun fact: it seems bumble bees like to play or at least do things that are roughly analogous to being play-like, all without any kind of human or hominid-like brain so fancy that). So, it just seems like hubris to imagine any corporation, research department, or a singular scientist cracking this nut. I think we're more in the technological Bronze Age with respect to computing than anything else. It would be nice we finally got started on our computing Iron Age.
He believes that AGI is an engineering problem because of the vast compute resource required for it. Being an engineering problem he believes he can make an impact.
Chomsky and Gary Marcus predict that the current approach will not be sufficient; is and will increasingly be detrimental to society because of that “almost right at best” reason. Chomsky only has hopes in a combined approach that integrates “old AI” with the engineering / data / GPU driven one. See also discussion here for anyone interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33857543
Is AI really grifting? It's not like mom and pop can sink their savings into AI tech and lose it all to scams, etc. like they can with crypto. At worst some big investors sink a big seed round in and never get it back from a 'grifting' AI company--IMHO no real harm done, if you're an angel investor you're mature enough to deal with getting burned it's just part of the risk (and no one is going to cry for someone rich enough to gamble millions and lose it all).
I suspect his AI company will be like his previous rocket company, Armadillo Aerospace, that tried to go after the x prize for space. A purely passion project that bootstraps itself from the start and either sinks or swims. I can't see Carmack 'grifting' by courting huge seed rounds from tons of investors, expanding quickly into an enormous company to steamroll into series rounds with no solid business plan, etc.
A scam implies malfeasance or fraud. There can be scam companies anywhere. What I'm saying is that AI is not inherently full of scammy companies, unlike say crypto. Sure AI tech is over-hyped but it isn't designed to defraud people.
AI in its current form is grifting. Trying to actually productionize anything with GPT3 for example is a nightmare, it can actively lie to you, the embeddings are pretty sub-par, and inference is pretty expensive. But you hear nothing but praise from it here on HN, and people act like the 30 minute web app they built and charge $15/month for is going to change the industry.
But it's getting better. GPT3.5/InstructGPT and now ChatGPT are showing incredible leaps in performance. Less hallucination, more coherence, it's getting better over time.
So guess who wins and profits once the tech catches up? Is it the people like me sitting on the sidelines and poo-pooing the tech? Or is it the people who have been in the space for a while?
Just the act of being "in proximity" to a technology can be so valuable. I know first-hand, I was an Objective-C developer for pure passion, because I loved clean MacOS apps and wanted to build myself tools. Well guess what? That proximity to Objective-C, familiarity with Xcode, and knowledge of Apple API patterns paid handsomely when the iPhone came out and I became an iOS developer. The same happened for WatchOS.
You see this pattern in technology over and over again. And I have no reason to think that AI/large language models will be an exception.
TLDR: It's kind of a grift. Carmack likely won't advance the field of AI or make a major breakthrough. But I have no doubt the infrastructure and talent he surrounds himself with will be able to manifest something profitable when the time comes.
Could you give some actual examples of projects or companies that you see as "grifting"?
Most companies are clearly communicating that they're in the R&D phase of the tech. R&D definitely isn't grifting.
The problem spaces where people find value and pay for AI isn't grifting either, like the bulk of content moderation happening now, recommendation systems, text to speech, speech to text, etc. The camera on my phone uses neural networks, with great success. I use ChatGPT daily, at this point.
What do you see as clearly being "grifting" (ok, lets try to keep Elon Musk related projects out of this)?
“During Meta's developer conference in October, Carmack hosted a solo hour-long talk about the company's Oculus or Quest headset. He admitted he had many things to be ‘grumpy’ about, like the company's rate of progress on technological advancements and the basic functionality of the headsets. He said it was frustrating to hear from people inside Meta who found the Quest 2 headsets so unreliable that they refused to use them for work or demo them for people outside the company.”
Has anyone tried accounting for the tens of billions of dollars Facebook is spending on this? This pattern—massive outlays followed by poor, possibly-rushed possibly-underpowered workmanship—sounds remarkably like corruption.
> 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 themselves while shifting blame for anything that didn't work.
The strange thing was that many of them were actually good programmers when it came down to it. It seemed like they had been conditioned by their FAANG employers to put self-promotion and survival above everything else, which turned into an extremely toxic trait once they were removed from FAANG managers who were playing the same game. The company had to steadily ratchet down the levels of trust and independence granted to teams, while steadily increasing the amount of management oversight and process to keep them within bounds.
Now whenever I see famous builders and founders leave FAANG companies out of frustration, I get it. The big tech company game has deviated very far from execution.
I worked for the three largest mining companies in the world, and a much smaller miner before that. The small company had 1 geologist, 1 mining engineer, 1 general manager and an office admin person. The next place I went to was a similar sized mine with about 200 people in the office, and many more support people in the city. The resource was 1:1 coal to dirt and much higher quality, compared to the previous place which was 1:13 coal to dirt and way harder to mine. The large miners have the best resources in the world so they can afford to over-hire, those people don't actually do anything but make things worse doing "improvement projects", and then use bullshit charts to show why it's better. We had a huge downturn in mining about 15 years ago and they fired about 15,000 people across Australia, and overall production improved! I only work for startups now where I can be a core engineer, I had a role before where I knew I wasn't doing anything valuable and it's soul crushing, I feel sorry for those FAANG engineers who can't break free from the golden handcuffs and actually do something valuable with their time.
Imagine that you're paid 2-3x, the work is confined to 9-5, gourmet meals on the 2x days you're not wfh, generous vacation policy, world-class benefits, and ample time to pursue side hobbies or family.
I know so many exceptional engineers that went this route... after they got over the perfectionism, imposter syndrome, and wild ambitions to just accept the status quo. Now, their lives are comparably stress-free compared to their startup brethren, and many of them live vicariously through angel investments using the delta in comp.
I used to work at a FAANG and worked from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., with no work weekends. Occasionally there was a longer work day, but also a shorter day. I think that was a fairly common day for many of my technical colleagues, whereas non-technical people tended to work longer.
Now I work for a legacy tech company and my workday is definitely shorter and less stressful, with European-style PTO, semi-interesting work and glacial speed of execution. My life has improved, visibly. I earn 75%-80% in CT of what a FAANG employee in an equivalent position would earn, career advancement is unlikely, but I find it exciting to have the means to live the life I want and pursue the interests I dream about at night, which are mostly non-work and non-tech related, without the time constraints and stress of a low-impact FAANG corporate position.
In the end, when I worked at a FAANG, I felt intensely the pressure of the job, the responsibilities -- mostly made-up -- and the ultimate insignificance of my work, not in the grand scheme of things, but in the context of the company. However, the money and the prospect of earning more were exciting.
Ironically, I did work at FAANG. I was a delusional youngster who was a perfectionist & workaholic like many of my peers.
The people I'm referencing who stuck around: they're now in their late-30s and early-40s. They eventually shunned ladder climbing and realized that their L6 positions could ultimately be sustained with much less grind while steadily maintaining "meets expectations" on perf.
Totally. My team often had people working past 8pm. But you could take a walk around the office at 6pm and find whole open floor plan areas that were completely empty. And you’d hear rumors that some other teams were expected to work 70 hour weeks. It just depended on your part of the company.
> I feel sorry for those FAANG engineers who can't break free from the golden handcuffs and actually do something valuable with their time.
Maybe they just don't want to?
Anyway. Don't be sorry. They get lots of money for almost nothing (in an engineering sense). And they have free time, so some of them they can do something valuable (incognito, of course. Otherwise faang lawyers come).
It's the big enterprise management who creates all these broken incentives leading to increase in politics instead of engineering.
> I feel sorry for those FAANG engineers who can't break free from the golden handcuffs and actually do something valuable with their time.
I bet there is a lot of jobs where you don't feel (and probably don't do) anything valuable with your time, but that is not necessarily tied to large organizations. There are a lot of engineers who make computers, cars, civil infrastructure components, smartphones, computers, game consoles, test equipment, appliances, power plants, industrial processes... at large organizations that feel that they are doing something valuable, and something that they could not do in this manner at a smaller company.
Ultimately, yes - nobody should feel bad for FAANG employees or anybody else who has chosen the golden handcuffs of the "cushy IT salary life." It was a choice and we are all responsible for our own choices... and in a world where people are starving, we shouldn't feel bad for somebody making a cushy living.
But it gets complicated.
A typical scenario is somebody choosing that life and after X years realizing it's not for them. But by then it's too late. You've got a partner, mortgage, pets, kids, whatever. And even if you haven't chosen any of that baggage, maybe you have a few hundred grand in student debt.
Yes, these were all choices. But it's awfully tough to know how you'll feel X years later when you are making those choices and by then there's no escape.
(FWIW, I have not worked at a FAANG. Just your average HN engineer type in a less glamorous part of the country.)
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 rewarded without having to invest excess energy in marketing myself internally in the company.
> 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 because of the real, substantial job I did.
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"?
I am a staff engineer at meta. I can certainly relate to Carmack's pain in getting things done on a large scale, there are I think about 9 levels between me and Zuck (so a lot of ladder climbing to reach my goal of CEO)!! But I don't feel like I have to be good at politics. You would probably be surprised at the level of snark which is openly published!
I don't see my colleagues self-promote very much at all. I am in a very practical and focused team though, there is certainly a variety of team cultures. I will say that the performance review process is a pain, I feel like it is a lot of work documenting everything I have worked on...
Literally every single company I've worked at has had loads of bullshit to deal with. Some BS was easier to handle than others! Overall I feel like things are interesting and there are good opportunities to grow in a big tech company, so I am happy for now. I've learned more in one year at meta than multiple years at other places.
The performance review process at Meta and Google is so exhausting… It eats up a good 50% of everyone in the EM structure, without (in my and my colleagues’ experience anyway) any tangible benefit.
I also work at a faang in a senior engineering role.
I agree with what the other commenter is saying. I’ve been in several teams with several managers and xfn partners and you have a lot of different cultures. From the toxic wasteland to the ultra focused get shit done right fast environment engineers love.
To your point about why more people complain than not, it’s the human condition. Haters hate is stronger than non haters happiness and are more than willing to share their salt
Because there is a huge selection bias that influences the sample of people that comment on these types of posts. I will back up the claim that, in my experience, a lot of this thread is hyperbole. There is some truth to it, sure, but don't make the mistake of thinking these anecdotal accounts actually represent the typical experience.
There is an obvious selection bias in who posts. Anyway I also never seeked promotion (even tried to avoid it) but have been promoted four times now. I never chase glory and only focus on quality engineering and I’ve always gotten credit.
People who don’t get promoted are likely to complain about it — often that the system was out to get them. I mean how often do you hear somebody go, “Yeah I was passed over for a promotion and you know what, I didn’t deserve it.” People who do get promoted at a FAANG (either by self-promotion or not) probably don’t want to brag about it because of the general sentiment here at HN.
That’s true. There’s also the flip side that those who choose the systems are likely the ones who succeeded in those systems.
I’m talking about directors, senior managers of engineering who worked their way up the corporate ladder. The system worked for them, so they think it’s a good system.
Listen, you're talking about companies with hundreds of thousands of employees scattered all across the globe. Do you really think there's one homogeneous culture across everything? Single orgs can have the population of small towns. "culture" is a local phenomenon.
There are promotion oriented people. There are not promotion oriented people. There are mutants who work 12 hours every day and call into meeting while on vacation because they want to climb the ladder. There are teams which are hyper focused on visibility and self-promotion, and there are teams which just quietly churn out good tech. There are hundreds of thousands of people. You're going to get different experiences. I'm not sure why that's such a crazy idea to you.
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.
Just look in front of you. The monitor you are using right now. That's incredible technology. You think that would be possible if people did not care about engineering, having a number of peers around them across multiple levels of the organization that cared to a similar level?
EDIT: What I mean is, you need multiple passionate people across many levels to achieve that. If reward culture wasn't somewhat healthy, I don't believe this could work.
That has absolutely no bearing on the comment you replied to or my own. OP didn't say anything about engineering, OP said you had to play games to get promoted. That's not mutually exclusive with having good engineers.
I am not sure it is realistic to expect that all the good engineers never get promoted and that there would still be something good coming out over time.
I'm not sure where I said that good engineers don't get promoted. Of course they do. They either worked for a good management team, aggressively self-promoted, or were in a visible project.
What I am saying is that there are a lot of good engineers don't get promoted, despite doing important work on vital systems, because they don't aggressively self-promote and optimize their careers around the promotion path.
There are also companies that are good at recognizing good yet normally-under-appreciated work, and there are companies that are bad at it. FAANG is bad at it, in my experience, and the experience of people I've worked with. It's an anecdote and not data.
And in my experience, FAANG are not bad at it, so my point is: These generalizations don't work.
I even stated that I don't doubt this may have been true for you. But if every large company were really so bad in general as is portrayed here, the people who make good stuff, and who need to work with each other a great deal to achieve that, would leave.
I feel like there are a lot more promotions to go around in bigger companies though! I've worked in smaller orgs and promotions are harder to come by, if there is even a career ladder at all that is.
You're still putting words into people's mouths. No one said none of the good engineers get promoted, they said that being a good engineer is not sufficient to be promoted. A good engineer who is also good at playing promotion games would presumably do very well.
PragmaticPulp specifically said the engineers his team hired were actually rather good, just had bad habits:
> The strange thing was that many of them were actually good programmers when it came down to it.
I said: "I never played any game to be promoted, I simply never consciously sought the goal of promotion, and I was promoted anyway just because of the real, substantial job I did."
And I did see other peers who did not play any games that I could see be promoted for merit.
So maybe generalizations over large companies just don't work well.
Now we're back to where I started: I don't disbelieve your experience, but given that you're the only one here who shares that experience I asked you to tell me why I should believe that your experience is more representative than the half dozen other people who have shared theirs? To me it seems more likely that you had a particularly good corner of the organization.
FWIW, my experience is not substantially different from the other poster.
I think that this largely depends on how good or bad one's immediate management is. Good managers hold the line to insulate their teams away from this kind of corporate culture to the extent possible. And the proportion of such managers varies from company to company, and even between different units in the same company.
We're moving in circles, but again, I don't believe a company can bring out good products for very long if my experience is the exception. And as so often the case, the "half dozen" other people might be venting for their experience.
If there is no somewhat healthy reward culture, the multiple passionate people in the many different levels needed would leave.
> I am not sure it is realistic to expect that all the good engineers never get promoted and that there would still be something good coming out over time.
I have heard lots of stories about how the only real way to get promotion/real raise was to change company you work for. Because getting raise is harder compared to hiring someone of the street with hefty premium on top.
I have heard lots of stories about how the
only real way to get promotion/real raise
was to change company you work for.
That's definitely the best way. Here's my take. I am ignoring promotions/raises given to junior/intern type employees who become regular engineers.
80% of engineering promotions/raises come from switching companies
10% of engineering promotions/raises come from doing greenfield work. If you can find a way to do greenfield work you will look great (because you can move fast) and multiple other people will be dependent on the mess you left behind and they will look bad because they are moving at a fraction of your speed.
10% of engineering promotions/raises come from engineers who show obvious managerial talent and are interested in a managerial role
0% of engineering promotions/raises come from maintaining somebody else's system
I did sometimes, though it still benefitted something in the end. After all, my boss and other people further up the chain have a say in whether I get promoted as well, not just my peers.
> 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.
So much this. I might even panic a bit if I got promoted. Nowadays I got so used to the work and tools that I can finish work in less 8 hours on most days. It pays well, I'm having enough free time, low stress because it's the same work I have been doing for a number of years already. Not much politics at my level. I just enjoy it.
The extra bad part about this is it's propagating into the industry as a whole. Much better to be ruthlessly egoistic and clear tickets. Demo or go bust. Collaboration? Ah well of course as lip service at best, for sure always restrained for basic survival. No wonder people are less happy than they used to be. And less creative in outcome. This is not how humans usually work in groups. Trust and camaraderie is prime. I hope at one point we will look back and say "Wow that was some silly culture we had going back then".
Their counter-argument is that leaf services like that without measurable impact aren't things the company should be investing in and it is up to the individual to recognize that and re-allocate themselves onto something that's actually aligned with the company's goals.
You simply working on a project isn't useful to a company, what's useful is working on the right project.
You get promoted and compensated more if your work aligns with the company, and less (or none) if it doesn't. It's your job to figure it out. Just as it's the company's job to figure out what the market needs. Yeah, projects that are most valuable to a company will be competitive. If you don't want to compete, you'll have to figure something out on your own that isn't as sexy but still provides value.
This becomes especially true as you become more senior at this kind of company.
If you don't want to work in that environment that's fine, maybe that's not the right corporate culture for you. I hope you found somewhere that was a better fit!
This is a pretty condescending post that assumes quite a lot about my work.
> You simply working on a project isn't useful to a company, what's useful is working on the right project.
No, my project was measurably useful to the company. It wasn't useful for engineers, but it was useful for internal, non technical users.
I helped build a team from scratch and launch a product with high internal user satisfaction. But I was told that I needed, specifically, engineers from outside my immediate team to vouch for me. And I met with other people with the same problem and they told me "Don't work for products for business users."
As an aside the internal tooling for non-technical users was atrocious. Wonder why. :)
> This is a pretty condescending post that assumes quite a lot about my work.
Sorry if it came across that way, that was not my intent.
> No, my project was measurably useful to the company. It wasn't useful for engineers, but it was useful for internal, non technical users.
If that's not what the company values, then that's not a project the company wants to incentivize you to make. If you choose to make it anyways, would you really expect them to reward you for it? It sounds like the issue was as I was suggesting, that what you were trying to solve for wasn't what the org wanted and wasn't what they were goaling you on.
> If you choose to make it anyways, would you really expect them to reward you for it?
A healthy organization should reward developers for making internal tooling that is deemed necessary for the functioning of the org and drives value, yes. You're kinda ignoring the part here where I said that it was measurably useful to the company.
If you're saying that you need to ignore necessary internal tools and get on the big visibility projects to get promoted, then thats exactly optimizing for self-promotion. Companies that ignore vital internal work that is not sexy and don't provide ways for engineers working on that vital internal work to advance their careers will end up unable to drive revenue due to low productivity.
This is the problem in a nutshell, no? A company that does not value a team that delivers measurable value to non-technical teams, and that provides no "alternate paths" for its non-technical users to vouch quantitatively for the promotability of technical team members, is creating a culture that is suboptimal for its financial goals. That quantitative bar must be high, of course, but if I heard as a C-level that people were getting advice "don't work for products for business users" I'd clear my calendar and get to the heart of why that was, because the very "routing fabric" of the company would be at stake. If they're not allowed to build i-tools, your technical teams will miss insights they need to build the right things, from the users who know more about the domain than anyone else.
I would love to have some positive XFN feedback! The farther away the better!
Unfortunately I was helping out with our hiring process, and let's just say with the recent downturn that hasn't been the most important work lately :(
Are you saying that people should only focus on building infrastructure for other engineers and never actually make a product?
Because it sounds like OP was doing that: making something useful for the customers, just not for the other engineers. Hence the engineers couldn't vouch for the system and secure OP a promotion.
That being said, bad projects definitely exist within big companies, and it's not always easy for (junior in particular) people to know if they are working on something useful or not.
> Are you saying that people should only focus on building infrastructure for other engineers and never actually make a product?
Sorry, maybe I was unclear. I wasn't intending to opine on that aspect. I think product and infrastructure are both super valuable. You're goaled on impact not necessarily on whether you build infra or product per se. Infra you're rewarded based on the impact of the product teams leveraging your infra - and product teams you're goaled on moving specific metrics.
I've worked at 2 FAANGs - on product teams - and my experience has been that if your product moves metrics that your org has decided are important then you will be rewarded.
What I meant when I said "leaf services like that" was "leaf services whose measurable impact doesn't align with org goals."
> That being said, bad projects definitely exist within big companies, and it's not always easy for (junior in particular) people to know if they are working on something useful or not.
> Infra you're rewarded based on the impact of the product teams leveraging your infra - and product teams you're goaled on moving specific metrics.
This was not the case for me. I was told that my project had significant positive impact, and had many product teams vouch for me, but it didn't matter because "the principal engineers don't know who you are".
You just did not approach this constructively. It would have been better if you asked first about how the impact was and could have be measured. Or at least responded more directly when they tried to explain the impact better. Instead of making and sticking to an assumption that the service wasn't useful.
It may well be that the person misunderstood their impact, but your arguments did not address that after the person came back with theirs. They could have been an edge case, that they are in an unfortunate situation in the human process of deciding rewards, where choosing and calculating metrics is itself subject to errors in judgment, and you tried to generalize your experiences to their corner of the world, which normally requires a stronger questioning.
Now, it's also perfectly fine advice that if a person wants to be rewarded, they should pursue projects that move the metrics of what's normally perceived as important. But that is also trivial advice.
A common chokepoint in an engineer's career development is challenging others' preconceived notion of what is important. Often this is with non-technical management, but unfortunately this is sometimes needed with technical peers too. It's politically convenient to just go with the flow and align oneself to the most visible metrics, but that way only a limited amount of bottom-up innovation can happen, and those can be critical to the business.
The best one can do is to establish the importance of the project before you do it, but I've seen important projects that were initially not supported by management, and only got traction when an IC did it anyway and demonstrated the value. Sometimes ICs were lucky that the impact was measurable and recognized, sometimes not so much and were deemed to have wasted precious company resources.
The world is not perfect and we often have to choose between taking a calculated risk or to conform. It's hard to get business processes 100% right, and not easy for a person to do things with guaranteed outcome, so we just have to live with it and try our best to navigate strategically.
That's fair criticism, and I appreciate your sharing it. I'm not always mindful that tone doesn't carry well by text, and I could have done a better job approaching this.
> Because it sounds like OP was doing that: making something useful for the customers, just not for the other engineers. Hence the engineers couldn't vouch for the system and secure OP a promotion.
For internal customers. Not real customers. Because they are captive audience. What they are going to do if generating a report takes 10hr? Purchase* different tool? Force devs to make w better one? Not their pay grade. They aren't even allowed to set requirements for features/functionality.
*That's when consulting firm swoops in to make great promises about how tool that they will make will solve all the problems. But because people who are using such tools can't set priorities for features/functionality, reports will generate in 9hr, but they will have to click ok every X minutes.
> You get promoted and compensated more if your work aligns with the company, and less (or none) if it doesn't. It's your job to figure it out.
I have never worked at a FAANG. Wouldn’t it be the manager’s job to figure out what I should be working on? What is the manager’s job at such a company?
Figure out how to argue for more headcount, by expanding the scope of the team or by asking reports to narrow the breadth of their work to create headcount gaps.
At these companies successful senior folks don't sit around waiting to get told what they're working on. It's their job to pick or start impactful projects in line with their org goals. If they're right they get rewarded but if they're not, they don't.
If you're junior it won't really matter. If you're senior, and you're sitting there hoping your manager is going to give you something meaty you're not long for that company - because that is not your job.
This was my experience at two FAANGs and also at one non-FAANG company over the last 10 years. Maybe it's different at the ones I didn't work at, but your snark is neither useful nor interesting. It also gives folks considering FAANGs here a false impression of what working there is actually like.
As a senior SWE at Amazon I had the autonomy to do this sort of thing as soon as the several years worth of work my team had planned was done. Half the senior SWEs at a big job board that calls itself a tech company are concerned with migrating everything to per-table microservices that expose endpoints that do exactly the SQL queries other services used to do directly. Thanks for your report of your different experience in a different org. I'll try not to give people a false impression by posting about mine.
I wish Elon didn't get sucked into culture wars, because slimming down Twitter's workforce wasn't a bad idea
I fantasized about someone buying Google and slimming it down too, because it used to be a great place to work (I worked there for over a decade). There were lots of great builders but they got drowned out by careerists
In fact I worked in the SF office around "fail whale" times at Twitter (2009), and there was a steady trickle of coworkers over to Twitter. Though from what I hear the leadership there was the real problem, and allowed the other problem to fester
Slimming down Twitter's workforce is indeed a valid choice. But perhaps Elon should have spent six weeks meeting every team and asking what they did before acting, like Steve Jobs did at Apple.
As it stands, it didn't seem like it helped focus the company in any way shape or form.
> I wish Elon didn't get sucked into culture wars, because slimming down Twitter's workforce wasn't a bad idea
I don't know how you're relating those two things, but it's funny you should say that. At the time he was firing people, throngs of self-proclaimed "experts" started pontificating about how Twitter was going to implode and crash and burn. There was about two weeks of non-stop posts from various acquaintances on social media about it. They've all been very quiet lately.
Yes, I remember these self-proclaimed experts' timeline for failure being continually pushed out. First it was currently imploding, then a few days, then weeks, then some vague unfalsifiable time in the future, and then they just gave up talking about it.
Makes you wonder if maybe they're the dead weight in their organizations, and therefore are unable to see how much of it is around.
No you've misunderstood. What I actually said was essentially that a lot of experts, aren't. Even ones who really believe they are.
Whether Twitter is doing better or worse really has nothing to do with these predictions that were made. The issue is that you obviously don't need literally hundreds or thousands of engineers to keep Twitter generally running and providing a similar kind of service. It might see a down tick in quality or outages, new features might take longer to be implemented. But that's not the service exploding and grinding to a halt.
I was just musing -- maybe some of the people making these kind of predictions are people who think meetings and work groups and committees and powerpoint slides constitutes useful work as opposed to a (sometimes unavoidable) drag that is to be minimized at all costs.
I understood what you meant, it's not a complex point, and it's not novel or interesting. That you can find people who are wrong about the future is not exciting.
> The issue is that you obviously don't need literally hundreds or thousands of engineers to keep Twitter generally running and providing a similar kind of service. [...] It might see a down tick in quality or outages, new features might take longer to be implemented. But that's not the service exploding and grinding to a halt.
1. That is not a "similar kind of service", it's worse service.
2. Those aren't the only things that are happening. Normal people are finding out that "the service" is more than 240 character text values (even if HN engineers disagree).
Spaces "coincidentally" shut off while Elon was in one and getting grilled with questions about banning journalists. Also, about 7 hours ago he tweeted "Spaces is back"
To me that's convincing circumstantial evidence that Spaces didn't break, he turned it off.
I’m not sure we’ve ever seen a giant company successfully “slimming down” ?
Sure, some go though catastrophic downfall and miraculously rebound from there, but that feels more like throwing someone down a mountain with a only a bottle of water and see if they can make it back to civiliation.
The more natural cycle would be frustrated workers moving out to make their own company and build something better from there. In the current climate that doesn’t work because of mono/duopolies and corruption, but that should be the thing to strive for IMHO.
Apple is I think a different case as it comes after a (reverse) merger, in particular as the main product (the OS) was rebased from Next’s stack and not Apple’s legacy one.
Laying off redundant people after a merger is basically part of the plan, and it’s more akin to cutting off the bits that don’t fit in the new org (they’re bringing in 500 Next people at the same time), than “slimming down” in the sense of making the same org leaner and more efficient.
Or if we take that definition, car manufacturers merging and getting rid of thousands of workers as a cost saving measure would also count as successful slimming downs, and we’d have many more example of it. That would work as well.
The answer to almost every modern financial wizardry is M&A. Sure, a DCF yields the theoretical value of a stock’s stream of cash flow. But in reality, M&A secures that lower bound. Yes, an efficient firm may reduce headcount willingly. But in reality, M&A provides the culture shock.
A few people including myself remarked how it sounded like Google now
And I noted that I don't think Google will "ever" slim down, because they're making money and Apple wasn't
i.e. there's not enough justification for a leadership shake-up. Twitter had more justification -- there were many CEO changes and the board wasn't happy with the leadership
I would see a world where the ad business gets seriously impaired and Google struggles enough to keep up with the enterprise market that they lose out to MS.
In that fantasy world something like Salesforce could get bought by Google and they’d reshape the whole Google’s product tree to solely focus on enterprise money, and a landslide of redundant engineers would probably be let go.
Back in the day, Twitter's error page showed a cartoon picture of a whale, which became nicknamed "the fail whale". The fail whale was a common sight on Twitter circa 2009 because the site couldn't scale fast enough to match the demand and errors were frequent - that's the era GP is referring to by the fail whale times.
> The fail whale is a graphic that appears when the social networking website Twitter.com is experiencing technical difficulties. The image is of a whale being lifted by 8 orange birds and was created by Yiying Lu.
> self-promotion, office politics, and collecting wins for themselves
A pal who was a manager at a FAANG said, "If you give people one game to play, they're going to play it very energetically." He was speaking of the promotion game, of course.
"You show loyalty, they learn loyalty. You show them it’s about the work, it’ll be about the work. You show them some other kind of game, and that’s the game they’ll play."
I often find it interesting how many people think the game is just whichever one they learned first, and don't grasp that the actual game is recognizing and learning how to play new ones.
Great quote and I think Daniels’ advice really had an impact on Carver. His character development over the course of the five seasons was one of the many excellent aspects of the show.
My impression when I was there was that most people hated the game. But one still had to play it. Well, I didn't, but that wasn't to my advantage at all.
The entire incentive structure and cycle at FAANG and FAANG-like companies requires relentless self-promotion and buck-passing not just to move up but to _not get fired_. Many of these companies have levels with a clock attached, where if too many quarters pass while you're at that level you're automatically managed out. If you don't get promoted you get fired, and the way to get promoted is to get relentlessly good at the perf cycle metagame.
In fact Google got rid of the 'up and out' for L4. And from L3 (many new hires) to L4 is a pretty easy jump.
Promo at Google was still toxic AF when I left, but it wasn't as bad as when I started when there was a clear 'L4 -> L5 within 3-4 years or bye' thing going on.
When you read the job description for L4 it's absolutely baffling that they figured people had to 'move up' from that. It's basically "solid and competent individual contributor." You'd think companies would want to fill their benches with that.
I did Google for ten years and I'd say this: SRE culture at Google is solid, with excellent skills and knowledge about how to build and run services at scale. Unfortunately it's mostly their own custom bespoke stuff, so those skills don't immediately translate into a new org. But they can.
SWE is more of a mixed bag. There are obviously incredibly bright people doing cutting edge software development at Google. But on the whole must of us were just doing very modest and incremental changes on protobuf shuffling super yak-shaved services that someone else had built the foundation of.
The transferrable and useful skills one gets out of someone trained in a FAANG is the ability to produce well explained tested well documented code incrementally and in a respectful and well discussed code review process.
The workplace culture stuff, again, mixed bag. Certainly to survive and thrive there, you needed to be thinking what to write about in perf twice a year, and it's such a constant that there were seminars and "how to get promoted" sessions where the whole self-promotional side of things was discussed in depth.
> The transferrable and useful skills one gets out of someone trained in a FAANG is the ability to produce well explained tested well documented code incrementally and in a respectful and well discussed code review process.
That’s why I mentioned that their development skills were actually quite good.
The issue was that they were playing a full-time workplace game of not only self-promotion, but of elevating themselves over peers.
This would manifest as things like campaigning for total rewrites of other people’s code because they all but refused to participate in anyone else’s projects. We couldn’t get them to do anything unless they thought it was going to be a good line item on their resume.
Working for 2x FAANGs, management incentives engineers to work on new features and not on integration testing and optimization. Quality, testing, automation are highly looked down upon and generally don't give huge refreshers come review time. However QA, automation, and testing are not only looked down in FAANG, but the majority of companies and engineers. How often do you see engineers in any company call themselves test engineers? How often do you find a software engineer who wants to work as a test engineer? There's a hidden snobbery in the industry against quality, testing, and automation engineering.
You see it on Hacker News quite frequently too. Quite a lot of people here silo people into "builders" and "maintainers". They then exalt the builders and talk down the maintainers.
I've worked as a principal engineer at Amazon before, and I can tell that testing and quality there isn't looked down upon. You can definitely get promoted just for improving products and never building any new feature.
However it will matter a lot on where you spend your effort on, and whether your environment understands why it matters. If you just mention "I'm writing integration tests" - and nobody knows why it's important to do that right now - it will likely not go too far. However if it's along "we have this regular operational issue that everyone in my org including the director was aware about, I fixed it, added integration tests, and made sure I added automation that will catch further regressions before our customers will observe them" - it will go a long way.
I work for a European unicorn and that's definitely not the case. We explicitly reward quality, testing, automation, etc—partially it's on your manager to explain the value of non-product work. We are literally having a pause on feature work right now to focus 100% on QA, automation and testing!
It's amazing how some engineers will try to politic their way out of doing unit tests and will do as much as they can to avoid testing.
It feels like any process that requires discipline, they'll run away from. Theres even tribes of people who will intentionally group all tests as "unit tests." There are other tribes who will try to write all integration or feature tests as "their unit tests". It's pretty frustrating to see a ridged and very well defined group of tests get ignored.
This isn’t something limited to big tech companies - this is ubiquitous. Humans automatically optimise for the greatest reward for the least effort. It turns out, office politics and self-promotion are a lot better for your career than being good at what you do.
Therefore, everywhere you go, people are usually where they are not because of competence in their professional domain, but due to competence in the social arts. You see true creativity, throughout history, from tiny enterprises (a fistful of people, no hierarchy to compete for, an actual shared goal) and from individuals. Never corporations. They just do more of the same, at scale, which makes up for their aching inefficiencies.
I watched my business grow from a fistful of coders to a political hellscape. Even no hierarchy has a hierarchy. Us apes just can’t be without it.
Many labour under the misapprehension that hard work will be noticed and rewarded. This is not so, and never will be, as long as humans are involved.
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?
>Why do they make it so hard to work for them, just for their employees to play status games?
"We only hire the smartest folks with the highest GPAs from these schools."
That was a hiring strategy that was famously debunked by Google itself. Now they hire folks that never went to college or were not CS majors. As in they can also be physicists, mathematicians, artists.. etc...
However, I guess they still though think leetcode is a useful signal to identify talent. Or talent that can be trained. So it is more of an aptitude test. Like how a college degree is a signal that you completed something. And a PhD is a signal that you can do research. It doesn't mean other folks can't.
We all know this fails to assess actual work performance (which is subjective anyway) but that is presumably proven by your work history itself. Work performance is a better measure of actual performance than the leetcode proxy any day.
It also most certainly does not select for diversity and different problem solving perspectives. This is a big blind side for any corporation. But you have to be an interested and motivated hiring manager to identify those people. Those are probably the best to hire though. I imagine YC is looking for those types since it is sort of a required trait for a startup.
Some of the best software engineering managers and software product types I've worked with are not CS majors and cannot program.
By now Google has the data to run the analysis for these types studies across the board.
They may even have natural controls (people who've transferred roles internally etc...) if they don't have proper randomized controls.
The coding challenges are basically IQ tests that have been laundered into something tangentially relevant to the job, since actual IQ tests for employment are on shaky legal ground in the US.
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.
They do get disrupted. All the time. And so then they turn around and buy the companies that disrupted them, and take them apart.
Also they have a firehose of revenue which makes it possible to hire hire hire, push compensation levels up, and suck the air out of any other interesting companies.
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.
> The big tech company game has deviated very far from execution.
This is yet another reason why I'm certain the whole metaverse project will fail.
If this moonshot had any chance of succeeding, the only way is to give this project entirely over to a someone who is passionate about the vision and has an incredible track record of execution.
Even if it where the case that Carmack where being ignored I would feel like that's a bad sign, but him being driven out by the culture means that nothing of substance will really happen. Certainly not the industry changing break through they're hoping for.
In the last decade Meta has had no impressive, game changing releases (unlike say Apple that has several), clearly the current culture is not great at solving hard problems. Sticking with that culture to see something like the metaverse through is hopeless.
I always wonder how "old silicon valley" work culture would compare to the current one? How was it like working for Sun Microsystems in the 90s? Digital in the 80s?
That is a bit too much of a generalization. I mean, sure, what you describe does in all likelihood exist somewhere in some capacity in any company that is large enough (and likely many smaller ones as well), because "humans", but to pretend that this trait is so endemic to work in a large organization is just wrong.
Because meanwhile, HN thread after HN thread was, for example, fawning over (very real) gains that some new technology brings (be it, say, the monitor you're staring at), while generally using a staggering amount of products coming out of large organizations. And before you think that there is a lot to complain about those products sometimes, there is also a very large amount of stuff that you don't complain about, that just works, and so you don't consciously think about it very much.
This work is put together by many passionate people at those organizations. Some of them are very passionate, and some of them feel that a small company would not have the resources to do the same level of work with the same impact.
Incidentally, I never cared about promotion at all, I just did the work that I wanted to held up to my own standards and those formed by my peers, and I got promoted because of the outcomes. I am honest when I say that it came as a pleasant surprise each time. And I do have quite a number of peers who seem to think and work similarly around me.
It's just infinitely more profitable to build up social capitals and leverage network effects and stage wins in this world, where economic utility is determined purely by subjective judgements and payments are autonomously collected. It makes no sense to construct a municipal road bridge when $15 gratuity transaction for 5% conversion from a social media post with million Likes pays more. Fortunately we are not there yet, but not far away either.
There's a strong bias for "just world hypothesis" stories like this one. Someone wealthy has to be poor in other areas. Someone smart must also be dumb. In fairness, to strive for anything you must have faith in a just world, that your efforts won't just be dashed by bad luck or a cheater. That doesn't mean it reflects reality though. It's just a story to help us sleep at night.
I think a lot of that is the unofficial stack ranking all the FAANGs are using. It always pays to self-promote since the marginal difference between you and another person on the team might be zero. But if you've been promoting yourself to your manager and the other team member hasn't, you get RSUs/bonus while they get a PIP. You can even have lower actual performance but if your self-promotion is better than their output you get rewards while they get a PIP.
It makes a certain kind of sense. Many FAANG companies are in such a dominating business position due to network effects and the like that they capture a massive economic surplus, and when organization capture huge economic surpluses, the employees are less incentivized to help the company succeed (since that’s going to happen anyway) and more incentivized to extract what they can personally.
IT projects fuck up all the time. Poor execution is baked into the human DNA. It doesn't take malice or crime to fail to be excellent. Neither the Newton nor Google glasses failed on corruption. Carmack is smart but he also failed to make his rocketry mark. Maybe individual brilliance in code is less important to execution of things than we (he?) thinks? Or maybe he only picks targets with hard end-goals versus the easy marks?
Saying this seriously a few decades after computers were room sized is I think a bit short sighted. Betting against technical progress especially in density / materials / weight is not a good bet.
I don't think that comparison works: the size of a computer wasn't a direct blocker for it being useful at all — it's great that I can use my MacBook Pro on the couch for a day or two but I could do just about everything sitting in front of a desk with a computer which was too big for my lap (or, a generation earlier, too big for the desk) because I didn't need to carry the computer around on my body.
VR is different in that the experience is worse until you reach a number of hard thresholds: the headset has to be light, yes, but you also need good display and sound quality, sensor tracking & lag has to be tight enough that you don't get nausea, input tracking has to be detailed enough to make behaviors feel realistic, etc. You also have practical problems for many applications — I can't move in VR without trashing my living room without even more hard problems unless you're doing something like making flight simulators.
That's not a hard problem but rather a collection of them and the problem is that the alternatives good enough for most people — i.e. few people are going to pay a significant premium for it, and even the people I know who have VR setups mention not using them much when the novelty wears off — and there's a real chicken-and-egg problem with needing high quality content to be worth all of that extra expense & hassle but not having sales volume to support it. I certainly wouldn't bet against it happening eventually but I think the trajectory is going to be more like “electric car” than “personal computer”.
Or the typical poor execution at extremely large tech companies. Where various people have incentives that aren't aligned with the overall objective of making a good product. Instead people are incentivized to empire build and be self serving.
Company politics makes me amusingly think that tech building would be so much more efficient if we had basic income. Then perhaps people would be deincentivized to show up for work where they didn't care about the output. And everyone who did show up are there to get something very specific done.
You get less people but you might get people who are there for the right reasons. Kind of like OSS.
I have a more cynical take on it. I see 2 likely outcomes:
1) You would end up with people showing up for whom it was important to those people regardless of their ability to perform the job. This is sort of like what happens with community theater. Someone who “loves the stage” but sucks at actual acting shows up at every audition and rehearsal. They never improve at acting but they always show up.
2) Things would break down into different factions with barely discernible differences of opinion making incompatible systems. You get smart capable people who can’t get along with others making essentially the same thing in multiple incompatible ways.
After all, isn't this how every action within any corporation is set into motion? →
"We want to make more money."
→
"How can we make more money?"
→
"These are the ways we can make more money."
→
"Which of these ways is the cheapest to execute now / maintain later?"
→
"Make this."
It's only coincidental if an action aligns with the interests of anyone outside the corporation.
In fact, this is how it works within any group in human civilization, sometimes substituting "money" with "power".
> 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 make it do something cool.
He has a point. The tens of billions of dollars seem to be mostly dedicated to adding invasive crap that makes the experience worse.
After the last update I had to "sync my Meta account" before I could do anything. I had to log in on the PC (with my headset on) and enter a code shown on the headset on my PC. Yea, that's fumbly.
Oh and after the latest update may play area is apparently too small for room scale mode, it always forces me back to stationary mode. What a mess.
This was after using the device just fine for two years without such boondoggle.
All the money in the world can't buy talent. If the talented people don't want to work for or with you, then you end up just burning through cash while the untalented/less talented deliver a subpar product.
This is false. A shit ton of money can buy a ton of talent. Not Carmack level talent though, he made Doom and Quake so he's already a multi-millionaire. You need a metric ton of money to buy out Carmack, which is exactly what they did.
The problem with Meta is the same as the problem in any mega corporation at that scale -- warped incentives.
If the only solid reason for people to work for a company is money, that restricts the available talent pool to a specific subset of people. And those people are wanting to maximize their pay, not the quality of their work.
> And those people are wanting to maximize their pay, not the quality of their work.
Nobody is able to hire very many people who want to optimize for the quality of their work. Few people put 110% effort into executing someone else’s vision for someone else’s profit.
This is tangential to your post but from the rumours I read Carmack is not the Rockefeller of tech you'd expect given the contributions and the impact he's made on the entire industry. While it's not plainly stated his fortune is believed to be far less than $100M. Likely less than $50M. Which is mind boggling to me given that Palmer Luckey walked away with something in the vicinity of a billion dollar windfall. It looks like Carmack always received the short end of the stick whenever he went to work for somebody else.
Hey, the equation described in the post does seems to fit the expectations for some scenarios, but as the author mentioned it would be good to work around with much more real world data.
"Up or out" is perhaps a form of this - keep a stream of pressure over the org so you don't have any careerist settling in and (eventually) clogging up the productivity.
I don't know that it's actually effective at that (or if it is, that the inherent costs are worth it), but it's a bit of the reverse of most recent thinking: keep people for as long as you can if they're sufficiently useful.
This is what another commentor said was a likely cause for the intense focus on self-promotion and blame-dodging, since head down actual work wouldn't necessarily lead to Up, so one could end up Out.
Don't hate the player; hate the game. Personally I could not work at a place like this, as my tolerance for bullshit, politics, and wasted energy/talent is very low.
The more I understand about how many risks and problems are involved in running an organization as large and with as high a social profile as Meta, with all the accrued obligations and entrenched loyalties and overpromising managers that glom on over time, all while building new unproven technological infrastructure, the more sympathy I have for how blurry the line between corruption and implosion is.
I don't think anybody trusts Facebook at this point, and the idea of being forced into a pay for play virtual world controlled by a single company is understandably scary and deserving of criticism, but at the same time I've done social VR and I truly and honestly believe it's a vast improvement over any other existing kind of remote interaction. I actually get and believe in the vision, it just seems like the execution is really bloated/bad and they tried to way over abstract things/make things way too big way too early. I could see how spending that amount of money would be easy to do if you're trying to create universal abstractions for making, selling, creating, stitching services for an interactive set of 3D environments together that is easy for people to make "apps" for, building data centers, accounting for latency, building out supply chains, subsiding hardware, doing R&D on tracking, doing social research, and dealing with entrenched employees and middle managers accustomed to "the cushy tech worker lifestyle".
You really have to try social VR to understand how much better it is than video chatting or text channels. There's absolutely something to it. There's so much more information in the way people interact about what their intentions are, how they feel about what you're saying, what they're interested in, etc when you're interacting in VR with a 3D avatar.
All that being said, the virtual real estate and clear corporate "branding" angle is really gross, regardless of whether the money gets shady/you could really call that "corrupt". I prefer the wide range in quality but genuine effort and creativeness you get with a free and open ecosystem like VRChat.
I have a quest pro, and it’s pretty awesome. Zuckerberg made the argument that Microsoft spent about 10 billion on development of the first Xbox, and that turned out to be a good bet.
But in the case of the Xbox they knew there'd be an appetite for a gaming console, because gaming consoles had been selling like hot cakes for over 15 years.
To the best of my knowledge it's negative so far but it's very hard to tell since MS only reports revenues but not the expenses. I'm guessing Xbox's main purpose right now is to serve the purpose of keeping MS relevant to home users and preserving brand awareness, but in terms of direct profitability Xbox is likely an overall loser.
The $10B was the development of the very first XBox and no, MS never made 10B in income on that console, on the contrary MS lost 4 billion dollars on the first Xbox [1].
The total revenue for the entire Xbox division as a whole is currently about 16 billion dollars per year and does grow year over year by about 5-6% [2]. But it's worth noting that MS sells the Xbox at a loss and tries to recoup expenses through accessories and licensing. With that said MS stopped giving enough detailed information about Xbox's costs in order to deduce its profitability, but all the articles I find say that it continues to be an overall loser for MS.
Its difficult to tell as it may be advantageous for the Xbox division to lose money in one set of accounts and tax area while profits could be recognized in a different tax area.
In the sense of external entities illegally hoovering up cash, I doubt it. For me this seems more like Soviet central planning, where real-world success is secondary to conformance to big ideas imposed from top personalities. It can work when the idea is correct, useful, and resonant with the people implementing it. But when the idea's off, political realities prevent honest feedback from rising up to the level where it can have an effect, so everybody just goes through the motions and things slowly fall apart. A reality explained by the ancient bit of capitalist samizdat, "The Plan": https://web.mnstate.edu/alm/humor/ThePlan.htm
If I understand the situation correctly, there are different headsets aiming to solve different goals, and there are projects to integrate each headset into a headset that has all the desired features.
I think it's a push to be first to market with a headset that serves as the foundation for a monopoly on metaverse-like platforms.
Like Tesla FSD, it's a knob for the company's share price. All VC-adjacent moonshots are. They're the encroachment of symbolism into capitalist systems of value.
John Carmack leaving your organization with a resignation letter like that is an undeniable sign that it is permeated with the rot of ineffective and self-deceptive middle management. If you've followed John's career you know that he has enough FU money and respect that he doesn't care about performance reviews, your promotion ladders or departmental politics. As he writes, he cares about shipping cutting edge technology nobody else thought possible that delivers exceptional value, and brand new experiences. His ethos is egos be damned, and breaking down organizational and cross-corporate boundaries.
Carmack should have been invaluable at Meta as the speaker of hard and uncomfortable truths. Likely Zuck & Boz have no idea whats really going on with their technology and are insulated by layers of self-deceptive status reporting. Once you step into management and away from the visceral struggle of building and using nascent technology daily, you are likely to make the stupidest and most illogical decisions. Setting that hard shipping deadline to coincide with your conference feels like you are making your team more efficient, but likely you are also forcing them to take on eventually crippling technical debt, or make rushed and ill-informed choices.
Its likely that top engineering talent, the ones who actually know how to build the next several generation of VR technology, already left or will leave soon. Those that remain will drown in so much clueless bullshit that they will pop out another VRML or Second Life and call it the metaverse.
I see a lot of negative comment on the other thread and on twitter so I feel the need to comment as well. It’d be great to get the perspective from someone who worked there, but I can offer mine as an outsider (worked on a different team at fb).
Back then, I would religiously read every workplace posts from Carmack (that wasn’t hidden to other orgs). I loved everything he was saying, I always found it really insightful. It also seemed clear (much before he went part time) that he was saying that on the outskirt of the project.
There’s a big culture of flatness at fb (and now meta). No titles are public, and you’re supposed to respect everybody’s opinion in the room. You’re supposed to lead without authority: by convincing people. You’re also quite free to explore things, as long as you can make a case for it.
There’s upsides and downsides to such environment. You can really multiply yourself if you create trust and clout. On the other hand, authority and a big title doesn’t always gives you room for directing a project.
I was always wondering how effective Carmack was going to be in such an environment. He doesn’t seem to be the type to lead, but I can see this happening in a small team, but an entire org that’s growing extremely quickly? For the kind of things he wanted to happen you’d have to make sure to hire people who cared about exactly the same kind of stuff, which doesn’t really happen when you’re in a diverse environment. Extremists must then spend their time pulling the group in one direction or the other.
I worked at Meta. Yea, there was a promoted culture of flatness, but that only applied to the IC side. Within engineering there are separate levels but everyone has the same title "Software engineer" so that (supposedly) level shouldn't be a factor in whose argument is correct. In practice, everyone knows who's high-vs-low level, so it's mostly a charade.
On the management side, there are clear titles, reporting hierarchies, and areas of ownership. They decide what gets prioritized, staffed, and shipped. As an IC, you can make technical decisions and recommend product ideas, but you'll never ship functionality to users without PM, design, and eng leadership approval.
Within RL, like everywhere else at Meta, there are VPs and Directors whose job was to set strategy and create roadmaps. RL had a multi-year roadmap aggregating roadmaps from all the sub-orgs within RL. There's no world where a single IC, even at Carmack's level, is going to subvert that hierarchy. The job of a senior IC is to influence and check their management counterparts to make sure they're prioritizing the right things. Clearly he wasn't able to do that to the extent he wanted.
When I was there a couple years ago, I looked into joining RL a couple times but got advice from coworkers that the rotating carousel of leadership led to changing roadmaps/priorities, so it was a thrashy place to be.
John seems to be particularly calling out that he was not able to influence the people with high enough rank to make decisions. So it sounds like he at least thought there was an authority structure there wasn't as flat as you describe.
There is always an authority structure in these kinds of companies. I'm personally familiar with Google, but this description of Facebook makes it sound similar...
The upside is that people, in theory, don't need to wait to be promoted to (attempt to) have an outsized influence on what actually happens on their team, in their org, etc. The downside is that the "real" power/influence structure can be a more nebulous/social game, rather than something concrete that is diagrammed out in a visible org structure. It was often said at Google that you get promoted to level X after already doing work at that level, which implies that the people with influence are running around influencing/leading before they've been anointed with an official title that "gives" them authority.
Reading Carmack's letter, it sounds like he consciously chose to prioritize his personal programming/engineering work over his social/influence/leadership at Facebook. In all my observations, past a certain level, you kinda have to choose one or the other. Both are valid choices.
Something that popped into my mind is the role of Linus in the Linux Kernel development. Imagine how things would be without him? Or if a bunch of business exec ran things?
A lot of millennials value freedom of choice and open collaboration ad nauseam, but this is the danger of too many voices—nothing gets done. No singular purpose. No authority—or rather, no respect for authority. The reality is: we are not all equal. Some people are just better at what they do than others. Perhaps we should listen to what they say?
But that’s how politics goes—some schmucks who have no idea nor vision, nor experience, nor know-how, rise up on the backs of engineers who do all the work. Typically out of insecurity or over-ambition they trample on-up.
And who would want to deal with the cutthroat bullshit of trying to deal with these people?
Go Carmack—create something amazing with your startup. Meta will rot away in the next ten years because someone else will invent a better VR headset. Just like Linus helped invent a better OS—free to use, open to collaborate, with vision and focus. With attention-to-detail and quality-engineering as a first-class citizen.
Valve is a great example of how this doesn't work in practice. Jeri Ellsworth got fired and revealed that the supposedly flat hierarchy at Valve is really composed of informal cliques - with the most influential groups having a direct line to the CEO/
Kinda what happened to communism in Russia, if you think about it
As humans we do have built-in hardware for forming informal cliques, so this could be seen as leveraging our built-in strengths (although you have to consciously work against some of the built-in cognitive biases that people have so it might be a risky thing, maybe not worth it).
The flat org of fb I described is not really flat the way Valve is. Valve is truly flat from what I understand, whereas the one at facebook is not but encourage people to behave like it is.
How is it even remotley like communism in USSR? Russian empire had the same governance structure since the time of the Golden Horde to present day e.g. very hierarchal top down ...
Right there in the title - Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)
Soviets are worker's councils and the individual republics are supposed to have some degree of autonomy on paper. For at least a couple of months in 1917, some amount of collective decision making did happen, although (as you stated) with virtually all Russian governments, it quickly devolved into one-man personality cult enforced by brutality and the machinations of the NKVD.
Can we really expect an employee who was fired to paint the most accurate picture though? What are the thoughts of folks that left on good or neutral terms?
I feel like Metas 'flatness' is revealing itself as suboptimal now that its stock is tanking. While the product is generating money and productivity doesn't really matter, the organization can afford to have masses of engineers doing not much of anything. But when things are going bad and clear top down organization is needed, then this culture suddenly turns into massive friction and might end up killing the company.
I don't claim to understand corporate structures or the best way to organize a large group of employees but metas problems seem to stem more from betting on the wrong thing which seemed like a decision that came from the top.
Top down organisation is slow, bureaucratic, and often is bottlenecked for decisions. Inevitably, unless you have monopoly or other form of stickiness, you are quickly outcompeted by the newer nimble organisation. (Hence why companies spend a lot on the stickiness aspect, e.g. Word proprietary format)
Not saying that “flat” works better (or scales). What does work better (with some other downsides) is a distributed system of companies (each internal company operating independently). Still lots of politics around getting the “budget”, still plenty of places to fall down with cross cutting concerns and integrations. Much like a microservice arch vs a monolith, the trade offs can be beneficial at scale.
I don’t understand what the problem would be for him if this was the environment. He’s respected as a technologist and had strong opinions on technology. He’s not merely a tech. savant without social skills.
Again, this assumes that this was what the environment was like. Not that it was just like that in name only.
I think he probably expected to be able to lead by authority, and tbh maybe he could have been such a steve jobs-like leader? But who knows. It’s also possible that there were much more talented people than him, not as public or beloved as him, who ended up winning technical decisions.
Large organizations all have all sorts of issues, and from the outside the devices that RL released were huge technologicL successes. I think we should acclaim the progress we’ve made so far in the field.
I’m a strong believer in dictatorship at companies. Every team has someone with ultimate decision making power, as does every project with a project leader, and above teams are leaders who have authority above them, and so on. Of course there are meetings and discussions but there is always someone with the authority to make a decision that everyone has to respect.
Honestly it benefits everyone. ICs like that authority is clear. Effective companies are mission-focused and they are not democracies. FB sounds extremely bloated and ineffective.
Every company needs a benevolent dictator with exceptional taste who is addicted to simplicity. This can be a platform architect, this can be a product person, etc.
But without that person, with design-by-consensus, you end up with a company that is addicted to complexity, building a product that looks like it was disparate components that have been continually stuck on the end with duct tape.
This is why we have the bystander effect, and why in EMS, you need to point to someone and assign them the responsibility of calling 911. There needs to be one person accountable, otherwise there is no one accountable.
Phrases like “benevolent dictator for life” have become pretty widespread, and they are cute, but I think the slightly obscure the issue or focus on the wrong thing.
A dictator can function with a small, powerful core of supporters (usually the military and then some key demographic or powerbrokers depending on the situation), and then keep the rest of the populace in their place through violence if necessary.
I think when we talk about somebody like Linus or Guido, they aren’t really dictators so much as consensus leaders. Everybody might not agree with their individual decisions, but there’s widespread agreement that somebody has to lead, and everyone can agree that there isn’t anyone who can do a better job.
And we should also note that Democracy isn’t some self-perpetuating system that can actually impose itself. Functionally, we don’t have a democracy because there’s 51% support for the leaders. We have a democracy because there’s broad consensus in the idea that, while we don’t always agree with the individual decisions of the democracy, we don’t have a better way of making decisions.
Honestly I don’t think it really matters so much how the decision making process works. Functional systems are ones in which the decision making process has broad consensus support. It could be tied to an idea, it could be tied to a person, it could even be tied to some abstract idea like following the rules of a religion. What matters is that people broadly think the system is good, follow it when nobody is checking, and are ok with following the spirit of the rules rather than getting hung up on process and technicalities. In open source, these tend to be personalized systems because somebody will just start a personal project and it will grow, but that’s very tied to the nature of programming and the fact that an individual can easily get a minimum viable product for many programming ideas.
> Phrases like “benevolent dictator for life” have become pretty widespread
I dont think anyone said "for life" here. The thing about business "dictatorships" is that they are naturally temporary. These people will leave of their own accord or be fired if they're incompetent at some point. And if the very top doesn't fire these people, making themselves incompetent, then their business will struggle to sustain itself.
It's not like a dictatorial government which can rewrite laws and use military force.
I’m blanking on the name of the essay, but there’s a compelling argument for the only viable alternative to a Benevolent Dictator being a very thoroughly and precisely defined shared terminology of the underlying product/software system. Basically you can achieve a shared vision only by relentlessly checking the assumptions of the group and codifying everything, or using a singular visionary as the stand-in for a cohesive shared vision. Hoping someone here can share the original essay since it does a much better job than I can…
But does "what is" really beget "what should be?" I'm sure what you describe would be very helpful but I don't see how it could eliminate disagreements on direction.
Yeah that’s an important distinction! Iirc, the essay distinguishes between singular visionary vs decision-maker roles. A decision maker is there to break ties and contain bike shedding, and you pretty much always need one, whereas a singular visionary is really there to steer high level design decisions cohesively. There’s a spectrum here of course.
Agreed. Hierarchy is important. Someone asked me to do something? Directly above me in the hierarchy - done. Someone at my level or under me? Add it to the backlog along with 100s of other things.
OP isn't saying that the person with ultimate authority has to be involved in every decision, just that when they do make a decision everyone respects it. You can have the kind of authority that OP is describing while still delegating most decisions to the individual contributors. You just need someone who is officially empowered to make the final call in cases where there's disagreement.
I disagree, they are fundamentally different cultures. You can have a blend of them I suppose. But you are either top down or bottoms up, and one of the top down trade offs is that people begin optimizing for what they think will pass approval by the decision maker.
This can obviously work, see apple under Jobs. But companies kind of have to pick a lane because the culture is either “drive to what I think is impactful” or “drive to what I think boss thinks is impactful”.
When has the decision been made? When the dictator says "make it so" or when the software developers understand the rationale and are able to implement it successfully?
Because the time to the latter is sometimes infinite in the dictatorships I've been in.
(In contrast, when a decision is made democratically, most people are already on board with the implementation details and rationale.)
If you can’t effectively communicate the rationale and intention behind your decisions, you’re failing as a leader. A dictatorship doesn’t work without a competent dictator, just as a democracy doesn’t work without a competent demos.
Yes, especially with big groups. In smaller groups, decision making is usually faster and done by people with more local context in bottoms up organizations. See Team of Teams as a decent reference.
Sure you can have a good dictator, but there is much greater room for a bad one.
Carmack (by his own admission) doesn’t want to be a manager, he wants to be a programmer. So he would probably not make a good dictator. He might have had less sway precisely because someone above him is a dictator who didn’t like his input, no room for decent in a dictatorship.
I think people like the idea of democracy more than they like actual democracy. On some level, most people would agree that pure democracy as in one person one vote in every organization is ridiculous. Any organization of sufficient complexity cannot possibly be fully understood by all of its members. It would be absurd for example to give full voting rights on strategic direction to a new hire. What I think people actually want is the sense that their voice is heard by the decision makers. They also want the opportunity to advance to the level of decision maker in their particular domain as they gain experience.
The problem that I think most organizations face is that they eventually end up with a strategic decision making level that is impenetrable by the rank and file. The people at this level only hire their friends or promote people who have similar viewpoints to them. This is incredibly demoralizing as well as toxic to the organization because you as a person who is actually doing the work have important context that the strategic leaders don't have and won't listen to.
Solving this problem is one of the more interesting systems problems out there. I'm not aware of any large organization that has truly figured this out (including national governments).
As a dev in an XL org, I agree with the parent comment: if decision-making power isn't clear from the outset, people hold important-feeling weekly sync meetings for months and then wonder why they can't hit the deadline. Also everyone disagrees as to what the product that we were building in the first place even was because nobody was in charge of clearly delineating it.
Good leadership feels like a democracy while actually being a dictatorship.
Walk people towards the decision you want using a Socratic method and then let them take the credit for the decision making.
Of course sometimes you will get a situation where someone doesn’t arrive at the solution you want anyway so you need to excise a bit of hard power, but hopefully that is rare enough that people respect it when you do it.
> Walk people towards the decision you want using a Socratic method and then let them take the credit for the decision making.
I've been trying really hard to do this. It is an impressive hack when you can pull it off.
If you have gigantic egos on your team, then getting everyone in agreement can often be expedited with a little bit of inception. My own ego is the biggest reason I have difficulty engaging in the socratic technique. And, as you note there are definitely cases where you kind of have to beat the sense into everyone else.
I am at a point where I kind of don't give a shit about the intermediate decisions and exact correctness anymore. I am far more interested in getting further down the product roadmap and seeing my entire vision unfold. Money has almost become a secondary concern to me. As long as the appropriate steps are taken, I don't even care if my name is on it anymore.
It is a lot easier to move an elephant when it performs of its own volition. The most advanced and effective forms of people management seem to involve manipulation of egos.
People like the illusion of democracy and the stability of dictatorship. As we can see from this and the other thread, when the proverbial shit rolls horizontally instead of vertically effectiveness goes down and leadership becomes impotent. The game becomes 'who can I blame this on adjacent to me?' instead of either up or down.
The best way to make everyone happy is to have the democratic discussion, hear everyone out, and then let the boss acknowledge their help and make their decision. Loyalty to the boss, regardless of their decision then determines performance. Team members did their duty by offering their best insight, whether it was selected or not.
Ask your hiring manager questions about decision making. Some I like:
“How do product/feature decisions get made? Walk me through the lifecycle of a new feature from customer/stakeholder to release and evaluation”
“What’s the org approach to tech debt? How do various proposed fixes get prioritized and worked on?” (In a top-down org even tech debt will be centrally groomed. In a fully distributed org the answer is something like “what? Folks just fix stuff that needs to be fixed.”)
“How do you align your teams to the company’s / org’s objectives?”
Basically you need to treat interviews as two-way. You are interviewing the company too, and you can always ask for another Hiring Manager chat at the end of the process if you still have Qs you didn’t get to.
Not sure as it is more of a culture thing. When interviewing you can ask how decisions are made. “Mission focused” is the term I use but I’m sure it means different things to different companies.
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 make it do something cool," Carmack said at the time. "VR should be a delight to demo for your friends."
As an early and complete VR adopter I have ranted in the past on how fast VR loses it's luster. But for me the reason is not setup (charging, updating, putting everything into place, et cetera), it's software.
The good VR games are really good, games like HL Alyx. But after almost 10 years of VR usage I still can't name more than 3-7 pieces of VR Software (games included) I would put into the "worth it" category. Anything else is just very short lived, feel like tech demos. Fun? Sure, but ultimately worse than regular software/games. Gimmicky overhead, so to speak.
Hence why my VR setup is collecting dust most of the time.
Seeing Facebook's vision for VR, which is just rebuilding products we had as far back as 2003 (Second Life) and even 2014 (VR Chat), but worse and riddled with ads and darkpatterns, is what has made me lose even more of my interest. I have to add that I was an Oculus owner in the past, I am now an Index owner, but what Facebook does is still relevant because they are the "VR believers", pouring the most money into it.
In short: There is just nothing interesting happening, my VR setup is collecting dust. Demoing it to my friends is basically the only thing I do with it nowadays but they lost interest too. I don't agree that it's a hardware problem, for me it's a software problem. Also: too much "vision", too little actual determined (software) projects.
This was my gripe about all console games. Real gamers that are daily users have their systems kept up to date, but I'm not one of those. I'm one of those that plays a few times a month, and only when I have nothing else to do. Because of the infrequent use of the console, I'm guaranteed to have to do an update on every use. The update alone cuts into the time allotted for gaming. So I play even less and less to the point that after my last move (3 years ago), I never even plugged my console in.
So I totally sympathize with the loss of enthusiasm for the delays from forced updates.
Nintendo seems to be the best at this. I pulled my Wii out of storage to play with my 4 year old earlier this month. Plugged it in and was off and running having a blast playing Wii Sports and Mario Kart.
I don’t know what it is but those don’t seem enough. Maybe it fights with sleep somehow but my Xbox is supposed to keep games updated and if I haven’t played in a week I seem to have a download. Annoying.
On Xbox One and Series S/X you can turn on sleep mode, which uses far more energy but makes sure the console never goes without an update. I'm like you, I can go long periods without opening it and this mode keeps my system always up-to-date.
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 sitting behind a user-commitment barrier, often collecting dust. Looking forward to see how Apple will tackle this problem.
I think VR has the same issue that smartphones had at the start of their cycle, the UI/UX is not designed to intuitively mesh with how users actually want to use the system. Even things like keyboard inputs are just not quite there yet, resorting to clunky index-finger typing at best and type-by-laser at worst.
I think we are moving towards a usable version of AR eventually (with tech still needing to catch up on weight/latency/tracking) but full VR is almost only useful for games.
As much as I'm not an Apple-enthusiast, the one thing they (used to) get right is the sort of UX where you almost don't even need to explain how to do things, they just intuitively make sense and you can just let intent directly flow. Given their current trends though I'm not convinced their alternative AR/VR UI will be that though.
I'm essentially waiting for glasses that go full VR when they need to, and otherwise just allow me to overlay a GUI on reality with minimal effort.
E.g. a video player following me around while I do normal stuff. Helpful, and importantly, optional popups overlayed on real objects to enhance my interactions, not completely replace them with a crude 3D facsimile.
Yes, AR+VR should converge into something similar to the differentiation between windowed- vs fullscreen-mode today: AR should be translucent, non-intrusive visuals overlaid atop your vision of meatspace, and when you need to sit down and fully immerse yourself into a game or movie, you would temporarily switch to VR, on the same device.
So until we have lightweight and powerful-enough glasses — not bulky headsets — everything else is just a public-funded prototype on the way to the real goal.
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.
The whole metaverse concept Facebook is doing honestly reminds me of Neom. Unaccountable god-king has a wild idea based on very real trends, has no real idea how to do it but a limitless supply of money from other things, and the whole concept gets taken over entirely by corruption
That’s the correct quote. The Quest Pro with its wireless charger actually largely solves this problem. Try not using an Android phone for a month, and then use it. It’s the same nightmare (after all the headsets are Android devices with internal batteries).
It’s an important gripe, but it will be solved. I think there are more fundamental issues. It’s hard to explain, but even with superphysical level of improvement I don’t see people enmass wearing VR or MR headsets the way we use phones, airpods, and to lesser extent watches.
I feel John's pain, after a decade of consulting and working for big tech companies.
I think though the major skill at a large organization is not speed of delivery, or even amazing software, but getting everyone bought in, and rowing in the same direction. That's really hard, and 90% of it is emotional labor. That's actually what a Principal Eng or Director does at a big company. Then if you can actually turn the 'Death Star cannon' of a large org at something, it's really powerful. But it can certainly be an exhausting skill.
I think folks who are great software builders, that thrive at small companies can sometimes fail to appreciate those skills. Conversely, 'big company' people look at the crazy, yet productive, ways of small companies and roll their eyes at their lack of "maturity". Both sides require very unique skillsets, and I'm appreciating, often disjoint sets of people that thrive in both settings.
John Carmack did a 5 hr podcast with Lex Fridman recently [1]. Moving away from Meta seemed like something that had been happening slowly over a long period of time.
network effects mostly. how Joe Rogan did it? not by being a genius. (by being mostly entertaining and a bit informative, and Lex built on this by being mostly informative and almost completely anti-entertaining)
Joe doesn’t constantly talk about himself, let’s guests talk, is curious about everything, open to non-mainstream ideas. That gets you pretty far. Lex is similar but with a stronger niche in tech, and ML in particular.
> mostly informative and almost completely anti-entertaining
I don’t agreee with this. I love Lex Fridman podcasts and watched almost all episodes, and most of the times I watch it for entertainment. There is some surface level information in few episodes, but that doesn’t seem to be the norm.
Many guests, for Joe and Lex, say that they are fans that listen to the podcast. At least some of these people do it because they're passionate about what they do, and want to talk about it with someone who they enjoy.
Oh, please indulge me on why? How much are you aware of his actual work compared to what you are told of it? And his projects don’t reflect on the nature of his ability to do other things. One must be careful to generalize an assumption over cohorts. If an individual has different political views than you, they aren’t suddenly more dumb. This is a hard thing for our species to work through at the moment.
I encourage you to look deeper into Eric Weinstein and less the memetic construct encapsulating a particular ideology and agenda through symbolic word.
i mean, first you target important no name scientists, there are so many scientists doing amazing work that the general public has no idea about and i'm sure these people are easier to convince to come on the show than high profile people, once you build up a following you start trying to contact higher level profile people and even if you get one, the next one will be easier.
He has the quality of being unformidable. The guests are very relaxed on his show I find. Tim Ferris is similar. Contrast to say Sam Harris, who although very erudite, perspicacious and articulate, asks paragraph long multipart questions and spends around 50% of his air time talking. Tyler Cowen is a better example of a formidable interviewer, who keeps things quite short and punchy and is always a little lighthearted.
Honestly his guest list is so good, I thought for several years that he must be working for the Kremlin and honeypotting folks behind the scenes (or something)
I take seriously the idea that Lex has an under-the-table relationship with government, but if you think the Kremlin is the likely suspect I've got a VR headset to sell you...
For someone who constantly applies bothsideism in the discussion of the Ukraine war and uses "Putin's regime" and "Zelensky's regime" in the same sentence (you can find an example in a very recent interview), I'd say he's not doing a good job of being a US government shill.
(Yes, I know that the original meaning of the word regime does not necessarily imply dictature, his intensions there were very clear and open - there are both sides and they are somehow comparable).
This is something I see really common with Joe Rogan, but it's also an "active measures" tactic taught by multiple generations of Russian (and Soviet) intelligence agencies. Bring in a bunch of reputable individuals and pepper them in with fringe thinkers who support your geopolitical objectives. In the 60s and 70s, more often than not, these could be people with totally naive objectives nice sounding objectives like denuclearization and world peace. Today, a lot of these folks come from both the far left and far right. Matt Taibbi (who worked in to former Soviet Union for many years) fits this profile
The public ability to hold coherent viewpoints on topics gradually erodes.
At the same time, find a way to blackmail some of the most powerful people (Elon?) or buy them out (Trump)
Or I could be totally wrong and Lex could just be a bleeding heart dude who tries to sympathize with both sides on every topic (I hope this is the case).
The real problem here is the memtaverse. This is a solution to a problem no one has and it's costing a vast amount of money for, well, nothing really.
Why does it exist? Simple. Meta needs a new monopoly since FB usage is declining and IG is getting eaten alive by Tiktok. Messaging (ie FB Messenger, IG Direct, WhatsApp) is not enough.
Meta has long seen VR then AR as the natural evolution from text -> image -> video. I think it's clear that the VR part of this at least is in error. Personaly I see VR as never being anything more than a niche. Somehow spending $20B+ a year on that without any kind of product-market fit or a vision for what problem this will solve for people is the problem.
AR is way more likely to have a future but the tech isn't there yet and there are doubts it'll be anything more than a niche either. This is a deep topic but projecting things onto real vision isn't exactly simple. Even something as simple as the color black is a problem. Focus is another giant problem.
For anyone surprised how a project can spend billions without producing anything, this is classic big company poorly defined project type stuff. A project will expand to fill available resources. Writing a blank check just increases the head count. It doesn't produce more just because you have more head count. People without clear direction will invent fake work for themselves. They'll solve non-problems, creates frameworks, add processes and so on as necessary.
Thanks - we merged the threads, and I included your URL in a pinned comment.
Normally I would have pinned your comment instead (sorry), but I needed to include the previously submitted URL and obviously I'm not going to edit your post to put that in.
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.
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.
Yeah I liked how honest he was! He was the one that had the talk IN THE METAVERSE, unlike Mark. He tries to push for the conference to be in metaverse.
I literally lost confidence for the Meta experiment with his departure.
Nothing could be a stronger indictment of Mark Zuckerberg's ability to lead teams and create innovative products than the fact that he wasn't able to utilize John fucking Carmack properly.
Even with all the money in the world, Zuckerberg is just too conventional, uncreative, and lacking in genuine enthusiasm. He's been totally unable to create the kind of esprit de corps present in every great team.
He cloned and acquired his entire career and it's made him weak. He was never forced to actually get good.
What inspiration there is at Meta today was brought there by Palmer Luckey and John Carmack years ago. And, since it can't be cloned or bought by Zuckerberg, it has simply dwindled away year by year.
The upside is that Oculus launched the VR industery. And now it's just a matter of time until VR evolves from a toy to a powerful tool. Maybe Meta will eventually make it happen, they certainly have the money, but more likely Apple or a startup will give it The Big Push.
The skills and talents needed to lead and influence a big organization are different from those needed to influence a small team. Once the team size surpasses Dunbar's number, a phase shift is required into a qualitatively different way of leading, in order to be effective.
A few years ago I took a new role in my org, a team in a big tech company, where I was expected to influence the technical direction the key infrastructure that supports our mission. I had no direct authority to tell anyone what to do, except the small team that reported to me. But I had the endorsement of the bosses and a reputation as a respected technical voice from years as a senior IC before moving to management. No problem, I thought. We're small, and I know everyone and they know me. Those things had always been enough.
During that time, though, the team headcount grew fourfold, we had been less than a hundred people and now we're three hundred or more. We stopped calling ourselves a "team" and started to say "org" or "department". It was impossible to have personal relationships with everyone, and the ways I used to influence change stopped working. I became ineffective. I could influence individuals, but without defined processes and management systems that cemented my authority I couldn't influence the org efficiently anymore. I could see things going in bad directions, and I could get meetings with leaders and give them my opinion and recommendations. The would listen and nod in agreement, but the ship wouldn't turn.
The result for me was many months of near-burnout, the feeling of shouting into the void. What saved me was leaning on project and product management, and stepping back into a role of setting and influencing requirements and priorities, where I still have a voice people listen to. I use my one-on-one relationships to preview my vision for our direction and get feedback and buy-in from the other leaders, but the PMs manage the team-wide communication and execution. After almost a year of this, I think we're starting to be back in a good place where we have a roadmap and know what we're doing, but I also know we'll never be as nimble as we were when we were 50-75 people.
I actually thought facebook was doing a ok job with oculus until the whole 'metaverse' social push happend
it feels like the people invovled are serverly deteacted on what people want out of VR in general
it's hard for me to imagine someone like carmack prefering to work in a envinronment like that (tearing down corp/product walls) vs building his own team and trying to solve technical challenges
I just want cool hardware people can hack on. I couldn't care less about the metaverse worlds that they were building but I'm giddy as a child on Christmas at advances in the hardware lately.
The thing that always holds me back is the lack of open datasheet. Then again, I won't touch anything with an NDA,so that's probably more a me being picky problem.
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.
I can't imagine they want to support two separate account systems, especially with the amount of potential PII involved (like eye/face tracking training data).
This required change is heavily communicated, when you put on the headset. Nobody will be surprised when their account stops working. Your comment makes it sound like it could possibly happen on accident.
Earlier this year I packed up a lot of my computer gear and stored in at the in-laws house, because we were putting our house on the market and this got us ahead on moving into a new place. Then the housing market tanked, my stuff including a Quest 2 is still sitting there, many months later, and I'll maybe be able to get back to it now mid next year.
I'm learning from you here now that I'm gonna lose all the paid content I have on my account?
Metaverse as a general concept is not a bad aim and Meta seemed to have some interesting ideas.
But their presentation was clumsy at best and they had miles to go to convince critics that they were not aiming for a very dystopian interpretation of the concept. They failed spectacularly on the PR side. Probably enough to make their own engineers lose hope regarding both ethics and executive management.
I think they might be right in the long run but that they are pushing it too hard when it’s not ready yet.
People probably do want to collaborate in virtual rooms at work, but only when it’s better than video calls. Which it currently isn’t. And they don’t want to do it in a world controlled by zucc
I don't really think that's it, I feel like there is enough prior art (Second Life, VRChat, AltspaceVR, etc.) that we know this has potential and is feasable. Its just that their technology isn't even remotely competitive with anything. Its all just a clunky, buggy, uninspired mess.
Its everything from their corporate design story that bleeds into every world and avatar, the laughable visual programming tools to create worlds, the proprietary walled-garden approach to horizons, the privacy nightmare that is horizons, the operating system being this hacky unstable Android fork (don't ever look at logcat). Its like every single step of the way they made the wrong decisions and executed on them incompetently, no money in the world is going to fix this mess.
I still can’t see what I’d be supposed to do during a work vr “call”.
A physical meeting already has everyone looking at a whiteboard or screen, which is already solved by screensharing. Even if you could fully recreate the experience of being in a physical room, what are you supposed to gain from that?
I don't know if you've tried co working in VR, or VR meetings, but "presence". Hearing a voice coming from a low resolution tile in a Webex is very different than having some resemblance of a human sitting at the same table, where they can look at you, smile, and you see them talking and hear their voice coming from them.
I much prefer VR meetings to Webex. Webex feels like a glorified shared phone call. VR feels like an actual gathering. With working at home, I think the "gathering" part of it has value, to me. If there's a break, I just look at my computer screen right in front of me, in VR.
But, some people don't like change, so I think it's somewhat doomed, especially with the "older" crowd. I don't say or mean that in a derogatory way, because I see it in myself all the time, and it's more of a contextual optimization than a shortcoming. Some people have been doing Webex for decades, have mentally mastered that context, feel comfortable in it, and don't want to even try VR.
The dirty secret is some huge percentage of meetings are useless and so zoom is a godsend because you can “pretend to be paying attention” and actually getting work done.
In very large organizations (>150 people) incentives shift dramatically because it becomes more valuable to engage in politicking than actually delivering value.
Carmack has perpetually worked in smaller orgs as an IC and has a reputation for being difficult (that is, a reputation for actually giving a shit).
Based on Bahcall's hypothesis, one potential solution would be to break the org into smaller units and create milestone based incentives like large team bonuses centered around performance bonuses
"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 designer credit in this context (id software) generally goes to Romero, if anyone.
There is a pay wall, so I haven't read the article. I just want to put it out there: Did this seem predictable to anyone? I had the sense he was unsatisfied and Meta's public perception, particularly in Carmack's department, seemed to be plummeting. It seemed very likely that this would happen, but maybe I'm projecting too much. I imagined myself being deeply ungratified in his role.
This blogpost from 2014 has been an almost perfect predictor of the last few years of the Meta disaster. It misses some stuff, but it's not really wrong anywhere beyond some minor details. It calls out Carmack as being the canary that will ultimately predict Oculus/Meta's future.
That was a good read. But I'm not sure about Carmack being the canary.
The idea was then that if he left quickly over ethical matters, it would be a sign of something was really wrong. But Carmack didn't leave quickly. It's been almost 9 years. And none of the reasons he cites have to do with openness, transparency, or abuse of user data.
It always seemed like a poor fit to me. From the begining, Facebook has always been an unctuous, slimy organization and Carmack seems to be a relatively high-integrity human. I'm honestly surprised it lasted as long as it did.
I’m fairly certain it started out as him expecting to have some sort of positive influence on the slimy mold that is Facebook, but in the end he found out that his advice was often just thrown to the wind because it didn’t match someone’s political agenda.
At some point you have to decide whether it’s worth it to keep fighting.
Agreed and maybe this is a little naive of me but I don’t currently own or plan on owning an oculus but if it was still an independent product via its original founders, I’m almost certain I’d have one.
Oh wow. What he’s describing really resonates with me. Working in software, I feel it’s almost dichotomous in its nature that people absolutely coast or absolutely give a damn. It can be so difficult to work on a coasting team. And otherwise, it’s torture to your soul not to give a damn around people who do (if you care, I guess).
In his role I can see that being a genuine struggle, arguably worse than what I’ve encountered. I’ve rarely had agency to effect change, or even the illusion of it. In his case, it must have felt as though he should be able to get things on course somehow. That would be frustrating.
It resonates the exact same way with me. I hope our industry can start having higher standards, or at least start respecting leadership with high standards. 5% GPU usage is abysmal and it does seem to be reflective of the engineering culture (from knowing other people at Meta).
He hasn't seemed happy since the beginning. So this was a surprise to me. I thought he would leave after something vested, but that doesn't seem to have determined the timing.
Wow can definitely relate to this being in a high level IC position, but not having enough influence on management to change the direction of the company. You sit on the sidelines knowing a decision is wrong, and after having said your piece you watch it play out over years, turning out exactly as you expected it to.
> [edit: I was being overly poetic here, as several people have missed the intention. As a systems optimization person, I care deeply about efficiency. When you work hard at optimization for most of your life, seeing something that is grossly inefficient hurts your soul. I was likening observing our organization's performance to seeing a tragically low number on a profiling tool.]
as someone who spends a lot of time in a profiler, this resonates with me. the irony that i work in JS/TS is not lost on me, but most React apps make me sad, most node_modules make me sad. V8/JSC/SpiderMonkey are amazing JITs, and seeing them get bogged down by inefficient JS is painful. i see many devs jumping to Web Workers or even WASM when in fact their existing JS and algos can be orders of magnitude faster with just a tiny bit of forethought.
> it is the more personal pain of seeing a 5% GPU utilization number in production
I think the 5% was a metaphor for how the org is barely able to utilize its resources.
Also wouldn't React JS/TS be an instance where you are fully utilizing resources? Not from a raw machine performance standpoint, but from a developer efficiency standpoint. Using nested for loops instead of a series of JS array functions is way more efficient but it is not even close to worth it. Machines are so powerful these days also that sacrificing readability/maintainability for performance doesn't really make sense to me.
> Using nested for loops instead of a series of JS array functions is way more efficient but it is not even close to worth it.
i work with canvas rendering and 2M-datapoint arrays, so for me it's almost always worth it. but yes, for < 1K elements it isn't. i wrote a 4x faster version of _.groupBy() recently to process our datasets. is a hand-rolled function worth it for 100 elements? not really, but that's not our use case. so, as with everything in life, it depends!
generally i think advice that will always be applicable:
- learn and use a profiler before there are performance issues, not after (dont treat performance as an afterthought).
- internalize which patterns are faster and which are slower, and when it matters.
- for any runtime with a GC, reduce repetitive memory allocation and GC pressure. prefer shallow structures. mutation instead of immutability (thus, mem allocation).
- cache/memoize whenever possible.
- don't use algorithms that scale poorly with data size.
finally, beware of following any performance advice older than 6 months; JITs advance constantly, so make sure to re-bench/measure continuously to avoid doing unnecessary refactors, and test with real code; there are lies, damned lies, and micro-benchmarks.
at work we use React, though i tend to work on lower-level JS code and don't have to touch it very often.
my OSS code (almost 100% libs) is vanilla JS with zero deps.
for my own projects i've been moving to fine-grained reactivity libs, like Solid or Voby: https://krausest.github.io/js-framework-benchmark/current.ht.... the numbers here are a bit misleading since the benchmark is dominated mostly by DOM layout/rendering, so a difference of even 10% is actually quite significant because it's typically pure JS / GC overhead.
React has many benefits for large, diverse teams (e.g. ecosystem, hiring, docs/google-able answers), but performance is not one of them; it has many performance footguns and landmines, especially with hooks.
It is just impossible to innovate and deliver at mega corp like FB. That’s why acquisitions become the only mean through which they can “pretend” to grow.
Mega corp are good to rest and vest. If you wanna build stuff you should work at small innovative companies.
Meta has made the mistake of trying to build the killer app, rather than building the killer App Store.
Apple software is garbage for the most part; they outsource software dev to the entire universe and take a 30% cut.
Meta should be doing the same thing but instead they are spending 10B to get people to play horizon world, a wii graphics chat world app.
They should be incentivizing developers of games like world of Warcraft to build a quest 2 interface; 100M addicted users who want a more immersive world.
This isn't going to make me friends. John Carmack hasn't be relevant for years, and this doesn't move me one way or another. There was a time when game engines were simpler and the work of incredible engineers who could make something happen five years sooner, but we're past that, and I'm not sure Carmack is.
> it is the more personal pain of seeing a 5% GPU utilization number in production. I am offended by it.
For a high-level badge post, I'm not sure why he's calling out a low-level metric like this. It's also a complicated metric. Keeping GPU utilization low improves battery life. Delivering jaw-dropping graphics might have been the goal in 1993, but we're past that, and for all its flaws, I doubt Wii-level graphics are the reason no one uses Horizon Worlds.
Which brings me to why he left now. The company doesn't want Quest to be just a gaming headset any more, but Carmack does. It's a fair disagreement to have, and investors are even with Carmack on this, but a mature leader would disagree and commit or quietly step aside. Carmack isn't a mature leader, he's a talented, high-level IC you hire as a mascot.
Carmack has simply hit a ceiling that others won't let him pass. Carmack isn't in authority, and as such, he has to rely purely on influence. Hard to do when you are focused on technology, because technology and humans are quite different (yet also similar). He's making it clear that his political effectiveness is limited and he has no motivation to continue his fight. It happens. You only have so much energy to spend in any given time period, you have to spend it where it will do you and others the most good. Everyone eventually learns from these things. It takes time. And how each person defines success will be a bit different.
Politics at work. The most infuriating part is when non technical people whose whole day to day work is about expanding their territory win through politics
Based on that hour-long talk, I'd say Carmack just had a fundamentally different set of priorities. He seemed to be focused on latency and scale, where Meta seems to be pivoting to fidelity and graphics.
John Carmack says himself he wasn't even the best graphics programmer at Id. He was very good at the problem of game development in general and very good at optimising for performance specifically.
It's not a "time" thing. Current stand alone headsets are still severely hardware limited, and extremely budget constrained. You have two independent ~ 1920x1800 displays, running at 90Hz. That's hard for a mobile chipset to do.
Quest 3 is supposed to have 2.5 to 3x graphics performance, so things will improve with new hardware, but you can only take it so far.
Another big problem is that things look much different/better in person, in VR, compared to a 2d video. I don't see a solution for that.
Or, you could say that Meta is focused on an audience that doesn't have a highish end gaming PC, and have a relatively small budget (say $400), which is probably most. For realistic hardware spread, see: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
But, they do still support that type of user with AirLink/USB. Problem is, there's not enough of those users, so many of the developers target Quest users, which where the eyes are.
I think a step function in VR quality, which requires a step function in the number of eyes behind a powerful system, will come with PSVR 2.
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
Ok then crappy 3dof VR on mobile, of which GearVR was a variety. Bottom line, Facebook/Carmack pushed mobile vr prematurely in order to get the most users possible, but the experience sucked and users lost interest. Meta just made the same mistake with horizon
From the text it seems that mobile is not the issue "5% GPU utilization" screams of seriously large problems on the CPU side. What where they writing their software with? CPython, an interpreter only JavaScript runtime?
Also the current generation of VR was basically build on top of smartphone hardware and there where quite a few ideas to make use of the full hardware instead of using it as a dumb display.
I liked Quest2. It gave me noticeable mental fatigue/wore me out the first couple half hours I used it but it’s bothered me less since. I think the graphics qualify and UI is ‘good enough’ for the platform/tech to maintain and grow traction. But some family members found it disorienting on first try and never wanted to mess with it again. That does limit the market. And it probably is the biggest issue as you say.
I noticed three other constraints that were inhibiting success:
1) Not a lot of free fun mindless apps. The platform seems to really steer you to $30 apps as its business model. I respect that, would rather pay up front than be the product, but it limits adoption/addiction/stickiness. (Of course with Meta you might end up being both.) Never had patience to venture into the side loading world.
2) Kids under 13 are not supposed to use it. Not sure why but I believe it may have interfere with visual development (and I believe it), and I limited my kids use significantly. This limits the kid adoption/addiction/stickiness dynamic seen with, say, YouTube.
3) Creep factor. Your every move is tied to your real Facebook name. I was always conscious my every move and sight was visible to Facebook. It’s true you are tracked/with the web/internet but in a less direct way. I suspect, but don’t know that this inhibits people using it for porn, which also limits adoption/addictiveness/stickiness.
Beyond those three, two more thoughts…
As many have discussed, I’m not sure what the killer app is, but a bit to my surprise I’m not sure it is critical… There were a number of fun different unique experiences (Beat Saber, etc) so I think it may work out without one big one.
I also found that casting the screen to Chrome didn’t work a lot of the time which limited my family’s ability to enjoy it together and help each other.
From his complaints, I can deduce one of two things:
1. Carmack isn't a good leader. It takes a lot of "soft skills" to lead a large organization, and while Carmack has proven to be an unpaired engineer throughout his career, I haven't seen him build outstanding engineering organizations.
and/or
2. Carmack was fighting for influence with others at Meta VR, and couldn't get his goals take priority over others (Zuckerberg comes to mind).
I wasn't in reality labs, but all the posts from carmack over the years that I could see really really pointed at him experiencing both problems. Not only that, but people publicly both agreeing with his concerns, but also questioning why he was complaining about it instead of navigating the FB politics to lead the change.
When a company like Facebook becomes successful it attracts a bunch of "execs" whose only job is to bleed the company dry. It's hard for people to do good work. That is why good engineers shouldn't join faang but do their own thing or join a startup which hasn't yet attracted the leeches.
People are saying “if John freaking Carmack can’t handle the politics, it must be bad.” And it probably is. But based on what little I know about Mr Carmack, I suspect his personality and incentives are unusually unsuited to navigating the politics of a massive bureaucracy.
I don’t really believe the line about Meta being the right place for it to happen. I think he very convincingly proved that it is indeed not so.
Seems innovation does require some agile leadership, and not an entirely flat structure which feels a bit like steering a boat.
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 it.
I think what he means is that he is offended by inefficiency in itself. Not because of any secondary ills inefficiency causes but just because he is that way.
He must know that hist last post will be read by many. Even if it would not leak, and only circulate inside facebook many non-developers would read it. And even if you are a developer "seeing a 5% GPU utilization number in production" might mean nothing to you. I assume it is bad from the way he phrases it. Maybe it should be higher? Probably. But honestly who cares about the GPU utilisation if the app does what it should in a performant way?
He could have just wrote. "... pain of seeing an application waste resources in production." And then nobody has to spend mental cycles trying to guess what does 5% GPU utilisation means for him.
(And it is absolutely a guesswork. I'm myself working in a team responsible for the performance of a performance critical application and I love to see 5% gpu utilisation. My job is not to fill up the GPU, but to do something useful for the business. If an app can do that with only 5% of the GPU all the better!)
And then in the next paragraph in an edit he tried to explain himself. Probably because people complained that they don't understand what he is saying. As if you can alleviate confusion by explaining more. Instead of you know, fixing the source of confusion.
I'm a bit sad that he didn't had anyone help him edit such an important announcement before he posted it.
> Make better decisions and fill your products with “Give a Damn”!
Now that I love! I want that printed on a t-shirt. :)
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 bad.
The thing that was actually unclear was people not understanding it was analogy for organizational effectiveness.
> And it’s I think why people appreciate him, because he gets specific
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.
Either you massively over-specced your hardware and should have chosen something cheaper and with less power consumption, or your graphics quality is far below what it could be.
Let's not beat around the bush: wasted resources are expensive, in some way or another.
Maybe? Maybe not? If you have a low GPU utilisation while loading a new level and only displaying a loading bar, that's not a serious issue. If a CAD software has a low GPU utilisation after loading that's not a serious issue. (It just means that the software GUI is written efficiently and can handle complicated assemblies.) If a chat application has a low GPU utilisation that is not a problem, it is simply not the application which calls for full utilisation of the GPU. If your inside-out-tracker has a low GPU utilisation that is not a problem, it just means that you are leaving more space for the user's applications.
But this is not the issue with the analogy. This conversation between you and me, whether or not 5% gpu utilisation is bad or good, or it-depends doesn't just happen here. It happens in everyones head who reads his post. He wants people to think about the organisational inefficiencies of Meta. And a significant portion of his audience is thinking "what is a GPU?". Because you can absolutely be a useful member of the Meta company without knowing that. And then a smaller portion of the audience is thinking "Is 5% GPU utilisation bad?" You could totally understand his points about organisational inefficiency without having to have any understanding of GPU performance metrics.
Meta has been heavily criticized on the poor quality of the graphics in VR. In this context poor GPU utilisation is a Very Serious Issue.
Carmac has been working with GPUs at a low level for 25 years. He's going to make a GPU analogy . Frankly, based on organizational dynamics, GPUs map fairly well. Work distribution, caches, warp fronts (aka 'sprints'), instruction sets.
As grateful as I am for his contribution to VR, I can't wait.
He's not only brilliant and no BS, but seems to have a way of picking out and focusing on highly relevant and fruitful threads of progress without losing any nuance, with whatever he dips into. It will be exciting to see what might emerge if he pours all his effort into AGI.
Also his talent seems wasted battling Facebook, if they don't want to listen to him, why bother.
Is there any reason Epic will not crush Meta’s attempt of VR?
They own unreal. They understand immersion. They want to have their own App Store eon mobile devices. They just don’t know “social”, but heck.. meta doesn’t anymore either.
Maybe GREE was right about seeing Facebook as their competitor after all.
Getting into social just gets you into a host of other problems. Why even bother. It's a high-wire act, and yes you get $$$ ad money, but it sure is vulnerable to any weird shocks.
I haven’t worked at Facebook scale but I’ve seen similar things at smaller companies.
A lot of dumb stuff gets greenlit because someone put a lot of attention and effort into making power point presentations, and no one wants to be the guy that says: this is a load of crap.
This is a strong signal of how the leetcode hiring process gives rise to a bad and inefficient work environment staffed with the wrong type of engineers, resulting in a highly experienced engineer to simply walk away.
I lost massive respect for Carmack after he testified in court that he downloaded ZeniMax emails after leaving for Oculus. He also claimed he rewrote all the code from scratch but it's possible much of the IP was in those emails. This is dishonorable behavior. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/02/oculus-execs-liable-f...
"We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort. There is no way to sugar coat this; I think out organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy. Some may scoff and contend we are doing just fine, but others will laugh and say "Half? Ha! I'm at quarter efficiency!"
This is true for any large organization, not necessarily Meta. Look at Google, Microsoft, Amazon and others.
I think he probably just watched his own keynote that he was forced to give through that Metaverse avatar. It was a much better experience as pure audio.
I'm very curious what he means about the software not being right. I haven't played with the Meta Quest but my experience with HoloLens 2 is absolutely shit on the software side. Microsoft used to be decent at software (this is opinion but I quite liked Win32 and MFC back in their day). The HoloLens 2 software stack is just ridiculous on so many levels (they try to shoehorn Windows and Universal Apps, for the actual innovative 3D apps, you just use Unity or Unreal???). I could not believe my eyes when Microsoft's developer documentation tells me to use a different commercial entities software framework for 3D app development.
This is again a controversial point (but hey ... so is the letter being discussed) .. isn't the software framework for the 3D rendering, spatial awareness the future software platform (what Windows was or Android and iOS are today)???
I'm curious if this is the issue Carmack seems pissed about. Clearly there is a story here.
This feels particularly relatable as my company has also been acquired. I now know how it feels to work at a large company for the first time.
I've always thought Big Techs where the best to build innovative products because they had resources. It's the opposite due to politics and bureaucracy.
Big Tech gets away because of existing products that were made when the company was nimble. Plus some products are capital intensive like Apple Watch or AI research.
The best organisational setup to make great products are startups. Politics tend to be minimal in early days. If the company is rapidly growing, there is no time for politics.
I think it was Erik Schmidt who said that when a company stops to grow, politics and bureaucracy settles in.
That's probably what's happening at Big Tech.
Ad-powered businesses can project growth by simply adding more ad placements in their products.
This reminds me that no matter who you are, solving problems in big companies requires an insane amount of persuasion work. Storytelling and aligning people on why something is essential becomes the job rather than the vision to solve it.
Corollary: if people don't agree on the problem to solve and its importance, solutions heavily tend to fail.
Whatsapp's developer had a similar frustration. Why are they selling to big companies and expect to have complete control? They aren't being realistic. Big companies are going to do what they feel is best for them not the the other way around. There's nothing new about that. I guess it's too hard to reject the big payday.
>I see no reason to expect that Meta could build a better CPU/GPU than Qualcomm (at much lower volumes!), and there isn't as much opportunity for full custom special units in VR as people think. This leads people to propose lots of MR features, which are of unproven value.
https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1603936133632905216...
I wonder if John is just not a believer in MR (mixed reality) that this is what actually led to him leaving. I could see him advocating strongly for pure VR, as its his bread-and-butter and where he probably believes is the most innovation. MR presents challenges and ideas he might not be well suited for.
Some peoples faces are different when they are alone. Some people struggle with themselves just to present a normal looking persona in their everyday lives. For them it is good enough to live as stress free as possible. Their true underlying goal is not to go out of balance. Let them be.
This is kind of a weirdly dramatic departure, as this was a union and a product that never made any sense on a napkin or the back of an envelope. Sigh. Hope to see him back on track and doing some cool stuff in the future.
Mark and Meta have been given a once in a lifetime chance to right their way by refocusing and ironing out privacy and feature set while Twitter burns its house down. I wouldn't squander it on the metaverse.
I resigned from my position as an executive consultant for VR with Meta. My internal post to the company got leaked to the press, but that just results in them picking a few choice bits out of it. Here is the full post, just as the internal employees saw it:
-------------
This is the end of my decade in VR.
I have mixed feelings.
Quest 2 is almost exactly what I wanted to see from the beginning – mobile hardware, inside out tracking, optional PC streaming, 4k (ish) screen, cost effective. Despite all the complaints I have about our software, millions of people are still getting value out of it. We have a good product. It is successful, and successful products make the world a better place. It all could have happened a bit faster and been going better if different decisions had been made, but we built something pretty close to The Right Thing.
The issue is our efficiency.
Some will ask why I care how the progress is happening, as long as it is happening?
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 it.
[edit: I was being overly poetic here, as several people have missed the intention. As a systems optimization person, I care deeply about efficiency. When you work hard at optimization for most of your life, seeing something that is grossly inefficient hurts your soul. I was likening observing our organization's performance to seeing a tragically low number on a profiling tool.]
We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort. There is no way to sugar coat this; I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy. Some may scoff and contend we are doing just fine, but others will laugh and say “Half? Ha! I’m at quarter efficiency!”
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 think my influence at the margins has been positive, but it has never been a prime mover.
This was admittedly self-inflicted – I could have moved to Menlo Park after the Oculus acquisition and tried to wage battles with generations of leadership, but I was busy programming, and I assumed I would hate it, be bad at it, and probably lose anyway.
Enough complaining. I wearied of the fight and have my own startup to run, but the fight is still winnable! VR can bring value to most of the people in the world, and no company is better positioned to do it than Meta. Maybe it actually is possible to get there by just plowing ahead with current practices, but there is plenty of room for improvement.
Make better decisions and fill your products with “Give a Damn”!
I think he has some good points. I don’t think the majority of people want something strapped to their faces. And for those who do, who can play longer than 1 hour without getting motion sickness?
"I have never been able to kill stupid things before they cause damage". Every developer who had to postpone needed refactoring to spend time building someone's pet feature that eventually got <1% use can relate.
i can hope that if you’re in the company you know exactly what he’s alluding to throughout this post, but here on the outside i’d bet more that this is the type of letter where everyone reading it interprets his words in different, and often opposing, ways.
The thing about 5% gpu utilization makes me wonder if all this talk about training LLMs on multi A100 clusters is largely unecessary and that it might be possible for everyday GPUs to reach say A100 levels simply by going from 5% utilization to 90%.
Honestly, I suspect that many people at Meta know that the whole VR/metaverse thing isn't going to pan out, leading people in that department to (say) spend time engaging in office politics rather than working on developing the product.
Two things made me raise my eyebrows about Carmack: the way he let Steve Jobs talk to him (even in his own memories, so perhaps it was even worse) and him joining Facebook in the first place.
I guess humility is even more virtuous than they say.
The way some users talk about him on this thread sounds almost cultish and creepy. I'm not American and don't play video games, but the way he's talked about you'd think he's Alan Turing or something.
Does anyone else on iOS get a browser alert “cannot open the page, URL is invalid” when the page seems to load perfectly? Any idea what’s up with that? Not something I’ve seen from safari.
Isn't the core problem VR. It will never fly. I remember I had some glasses that you put your phone in. Worked perfectly. But VR is even more annoying than home 3D movies.
Could it be a communication or persuasion skill lacking? Usually very smart engs cannot convey their point to less Talented ppl that usually makes the decisions
Given that Facebook accounts are now to suddenly be converted to Meta accounts, I am almost inclined to assume that it has something sinister to do with this.
Why Carmack was involved with Facebook/Meta when he joined was pretty confusing to me. Even if VR is pretty interesting technology to work on, where’s the joy in it if you’re effectively working for the Empire?
Keep in mind he joined Oculus BEFORE the purchase, he didn't chose Meta specifically, he just chose to stick around because he believed in the VR mission enough to try and make it work.
As someone else has mentioned, I believe it's a metaphor for Meta as a company. It's probably a little extreme at 5% but he's suggesting they're only working at that efficiency level.
For the monster hardware it has, Oculus (at least in games) can only rival a PS2 in terms of polygon count. Pair that with the 5% GPU utilization metric and you get that this device can handle a whole lot more load and it's just being used inefficiently. I'd even use the word 'wrong', people within Meta made 'good enough' libraries and called it a day, and he's mad about that.
This thing has billions of dollars poured into it, and all you get is PS2/PSP level graphics? No way, man.
Carmack of all people knows the kind of feats this machine is capable of, having worked complex optimization problems in the RAGE Engine and the old Quake engine too.
It sounded more like he meant that he is seeing their organization be inefficient at working on the right things and making progress towards VR.
And as a person who cares deeply about efficiency of resources, that pains him to see so much human resources (in this case) being wasted when they could accomplish so much more so much quicker (in his opinion) with better focus and direction.
And he likened it to the same feeling he'd have if he saw a game making use of only 5% of the available GPU, which would be that feeling of all that wasted potential.
This is the end of my decade in VR. I have mixed feelings.
Quest 2 is almost exactly what I wanted to see from the beginning – mobile hardware, inside out tracking, optional PC streaming, 4k (ish) screen, cost effective. Despite all the complaints I have about our software, millions of people are still getting value out of it. We have a good product. It is successful, and successful products make the world a better place. It all could have happened a bit faster and been going better if different decisions had been made, but we built something pretty close to The Right Thing.
The issue is our efficiency.
Some will ask why I care how the progress is happening, as long as it is happening?
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 it.
[edit: I was being overly poetic here, as several people have missed the intention. As a systems optimization person, I care deeply about efficiency. When you work hard at optimization for most of your life, seeing something that is grossly inefficient hurts your soul. I was likening observing our organization's performance to seeing a tragically low number on a profiling tool.]
We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort. There is no way to sugar coat this; I think out organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy. Some may scoff and contend we are doing just fine, but others will laugh and say "Half? Ha! I'm at quarter efficiency!"
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 ot 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 think my influence at the margins has been positive, but it has never been a prime mover.
This was admittedly self-inflicted – I could have moved to Menlo Park after the Oculus acquisition and tried to wage battles with generations of leadership, but I was busy programming, and I assumed I would hate it, be bad at it, and probably lose anyway.
Enough complaining. I wearied of the fight and have my own startup to run, but the fight is still winnable! VR can bring value to most of the people in the world, and no company is better positioned to do it than Meta. Maybe it is actually possible to get there by just plowing ahead with current practices, but there is plenty of room for improvement.
Make better decisions and fill your products with "Give a Damn!"
I resigned from my position as an executive consultant for VR with Meta. My internal post to the company got leaked to the press, but that just results in them picking a few choice bits out of it. Here is the full post, just as the internal employees saw it:
-------------
This is the end of my decade in VR.
I have mixed feelings.
Quest 2 is almost exactly what I wanted to see from the beginning – mobile hardware, inside out tracking, optional PC streaming, 4k (ish) screen, cost effective. Despite all the complaints I have about our software, millions of people are still getting value out of it. We have a good product. It is successful, and successful products make the world a better place. It all could have happened a bit faster and been going better if different decisions had been made, but we built something pretty close to The Right Thing.
The issue is our efficiency.
Some will ask why I care how the progress is happening, as long as it is happening?
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 it.
[edit: I was being overly poetic here, as several people have missed the intention. As a systems optimization person, I care deeply about efficiency. When you work hard at optimization for most of your life, seeing something that is grossly inefficient hurts your soul. I was likening observing our organization's performance to seeing a tragically low number on a profiling tool.]
We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort. There is no way to sugar coat this; I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy. Some may scoff and contend we are doing just fine, but others will laugh and say “Half? Ha! I’m at quarter efficiency!”
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 think my influence at the margins has been positive, but it has never been a prime mover.
This was admittedly self-inflicted – I could have moved to Menlo Park after the Oculus acquisition and tried to wage battles with generations of leadership, but I was busy programming, and I assumed I would hate it, be bad at it, and probably lose anyway.
Enough complaining. I wearied of the fight and have my own startup to run, but the fight is still winnable! VR can bring value to most of the people in the world, and no company is better positioned to do it than Meta. Maybe it actually is possible to get there by just plowing ahead with current practices, but there is plenty of room for improvement.
Make better decisions and fill your products with “Give a Damn”!
```
I resigned from my position as an executive consultant for VR with Meta. My internal post to the company got leaked to the press, but that just results in them picking a few choice bits out of it. Here is the full post, just as the internal employees saw it:
-------------
This is the end of my decade in VR.
I have mixed feelings.
Quest 2 is almost exactly what I wanted to see from the beginning – mobile hardware, inside out tracking, optional PC streaming, 4k (ish) screen, cost effective. Despite all the complaints I have about our software, millions of people are still getting value out of it. We have a good product. It is successful, and successful products make the world a better place. It all could have happened a bit faster and been going better if different decisions had been made, but we built something pretty close to The Right Thing.
The issue is our efficiency.
Some will ask why I care how the progress is happening, as long as it is happening?
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 it.
[edit: I was being overly poetic here, as several people have missed the intention. As a systems optimization person, I care deeply about efficiency. When you work hard at optimization for most of your life, seeing something that is grossly inefficient hurts your soul. I was likening observing our organization's performance to seeing a tragically low number on a profiling tool.]
We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort. There is no way to sugar coat this; I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy. Some may scoff and contend we are doing just fine, but others will laugh and say “Half? Ha! I’m at quarter efficiency!”
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 think my influence at the margins has been positive, but it has never been a prime mover.
This was admittedly self-inflicted – I could have moved to Menlo Park after the Oculus acquisition and tried to wage battles with generations of leadership, but I was busy programming, and I assumed I would hate it, be bad at it, and probably lose anyway.
Enough complaining. I wearied of the fight and have my own startup to run, but the fight is still winnable! VR can bring value to most of the people in the world, and no company is better positioned to do it than Meta. Maybe it actually is possible to get there by just plowing ahead with current practices, but there is plenty of room for improvement.
Make better decisions and fill your products with “Give a Damn”!
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Please don't take HN threads into ideological flamewar. Regardless of which you're for or against, it's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Maybe I misunderstand what flat hierarchy means, but I don't think it is the same as "design by committee". It can still involve a single person making all important decisions; only that person isn't the one with the official title but rather whoever wins the most respect, has the most persuasive vision, etc.
"Can" is the key word here. What is the likely outcome: design by committee or merit worthy lead.
Also there is stability in organizational structure. This has obvious +/- points, with feature of e.g. 'Ives is leading the design' gives high probability that product line will remain consistent per a known standard, with the (equally high probability) bug of e.g. 'Ives is leading the design' gives high probability it will be more about the object than the user.
Both of the above are really manifestations of an increased degree of non-determinism in team operation. I think flat and/or dynamic order (per project) are still well worth considering, but imo this approach raises the bar on hiring. Before, you would need to trust the judgment of a few key employees, and now you must hope for the good judgment of nearly all of them.
> I have no idea when "design by committee" became something to emulate.
When we renamed it with a catchy name: Agile. The Manifesto's entire deal is highlighting the key considerations an organization must take into account if they want to move to a flat organizational structure.
Depends on whether you see the Stasi and KGB as "left" or "right" organizations. It doesn't take a whole lot of thought to convince yourself that these are the wrong terms to use when discussing the problem of large-scale data collection and misuse.
As for Orwell, he was a socialist, for what little that's worth.
Well, he fought the fascists in Spain (you can read homage to Catalonia) so he knew about them. Animal farm is his description of the Russian revolution and after. Ww ii saw two right wing, one left wing and Japan as the totalitarian states.
The opening paragraph says "we have a good product". No, you have a good device, it's not the same thing. Maybe he thinks org ineffeciency is about not covering enough product use cases but the other parts of the post suggest focus on technical characteristics as the metric to measure success. Obviously he is way smarter than me so what do I know but that's what I see.
