Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

How does any company burn $36 billion on a headset they got handed a prototype for?

At a reasonable $100k/yr and 50% overhead, that's 240,000 years of labor. ~5000 human lifetimes. At a .gov labor rate of 2080 hrs/yr, that's 500,000,000 hrs of work wasted? For mediocre "not a product rendering" that looks like 90's Second Life? I'm not usually the graphic resolution crowd, yet that was rather underwhelming. Could'a just taken a picture of the inside of the Quest view and it would have been better.

Trying to avoid humble bragging, yet last year I put in four government proposals (one 20-pager, rest were 5-10), wrote a web app, converted a NIST matrix package to a different language, and wrote a mixed Android / Windows app for cross-communication. I may have observer bias, and not be representative. However, that was one year, not 5000 lifetimes... You'd think they would have more than a single game as their killer app. Not even Pokemon Go or similar? It's such an obvious previous idea.




100k/yr is not reasonable for Bay Area, let alone top talent. There are people working on it making $1M/yr+. Junior developers straight out of college are making more at Meta. You're also assuming everything went to just engineering payroll, which is obviously not true.


The numbers aren't all that much more palatable at 24,000 man-years, assuming $1M average TC.

That's equivalent to the amount of labor it took to build some of the minor Egyptian pyramids.


Then FB/Meta's throwing money out the door on people who demonstrably do not deserve $1M+/yr.

And on that topic, same with Wikipedia, why "must" you have your development base in the most expensive place on the West Coast?

Per https://www.gamedevmap.com/ there are Many other, less expensive, locations. America has a bunch, even Africa has gamedevs. They're an International megacorp, with 3 billion monthly active user (probably still a lot of dupes). India has the largest FB audience (366 million, 2024), not America (100 million). Will an Indian developer make you a launch app for less than $1M+/yr? New Dehli has 17 game studios (including Riot Games) and Mumbai has 33 (Ubisoft Mumbai and Pune).


How is it demonstrable that they aren't worth $1m per year?

While in many cases folks are overpaid in big tech, some of them are insanely talented people who can do things others simply cannot.


> How is it demonstrable that they aren't worth $1m per year?

Probably because of this:

> How does any company burn $36 billion on a headset they got handed a prototype for?


That's confusing the decision to work on something with the quality of the folks working on it. Brilliant engineers often work on things which are risky from a market perspective. It doesn't make them less brilliant at engineering when it turns out there isn't a market for the thing.

John Carmack appears to be brilliant. I'd guess he would admit the VR market didn't turn out as hoped.


> he would admit the VR market didn't turn out as hoped

That's not what he said though. What he said is that Meta is basically incompetent.


And from a leadership perspective it might well be / might have been. I don't think he ever criticized the quality of engineers there.


I want to make a snarky comment about how any reasonable person would want 10x that to work for Facebook but 500 human lifetimes is still a wild amount of time for what they’ve gotten.


In terms of difficulty/complexity, nothing you've listed there comes anywhere close to the r&d required to go from the original oculus prototype to volume shipping the meta quest 3.


They didn't and they didn't.




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: