5 ms·

What in the world was Carmack doing, working on another company's project, using your current company's time and resources? Don't get me wrong, the guy is a ge

by daenz 10y ago

What in the world was Carmack doing, working on another company's project, using your current company's time and resources? Don't get me wrong, the guy is a genius, and I love nearly everything he has a hand in, but you would think that with his level of seniority, some alarm bells would have gone off in his head.

legodt 10y ago
I don't think Carmack works that way. All he really cares about professionally (I'm not talking about his personal life or rocketry) is doing good work and pushing his code to the limits of the field. Oculus hardware was a big coding challenge without much marked territory or set rules for Carmack, so that's probably the only thing he was thinking about while working.
- bishnu 10y ago
  If he does, he's come a long way from the John Carmack that consistently open-sourced his 3D engines and followed up with developers who failed to abide by the GPL [0]. (I don't think he works the way you describe at all). [0] https://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/finger.pl?id=1&time=20000223184151 https://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/finger.pl?id=1&time=200002...
leggomylibro 10y ago
Some alarm bells probably did go off, but they were probably silenced fairly quickly with something along the lines of, "but this is really cool and I want to work on it. Plus, it's not like my employer is actively working on a VR that I'd be competing with." And at the end of the day, Carmack isn't the one who is out $500M, is he?
- jMyles 10y ago
  In retrospect, he came out smelling like roses.
- spatulon 10y ago
  He is personally out $150m, according to the article.
  - Idontagree 10y ago
    That seems like a lot, I didn't think he was worth that much, maybe I'm undervaluing his net worth. Is there a value for that anywhere?
    - gpderetta 10y ago
      Well, he had to stop playing with rockets as he was running out of FU money...
    - stupidcar 10y ago
      He presumably got a sizeable chunk of Oculus shares when he joined as CTO, and those would have been converted to a valuable amount of Facebook equity during the $3bn buyout. Kind of irrelevant though, as the article is wrong, and it's actually Luckey and Iribe who are personally liable, and not Carmack.
  - teej 10y ago
    The Variety article says Carmack but the TechCrunch article says Iribe. I'm having trouble finding the actual source.
    - k-t 10y ago
      The court documents say Iribe. Carmack took his emails with him on a USB stick (which Zenimax's lawyer called "10,000 confidential documents") but the jury didn't award any damages for that.
JohnDotAwesome 10y ago
There's a story in Masters of Doom where Carmack and Romero do just that. If I recall correctly, they would take company (Softdisk I believe) computers at night because they were more powerful than their home computers, and use them to develop their own games. I think they even worked on their own games on company time. I might be getting the details wrong on that one, but sounds like Carmack dgaf (or just doesn't think about how these things could potentially be wrong/misaligned).
- jfolkins 10y ago
  LOVE THIS BOOK! And you are correct, they indeed "borrowed" the machines.
- Mizza 10y ago
  Carmack is way more of a badass punk than his demeanor makes him out to be. When he was 14, he got sentenced to a year in juvie for stealing his school's Apple IIs. He broke in using thermite. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack#Early_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack#Early_life
- cma 10y ago
  I believe they settled it by paying some royalties on Commander Keen. A lot of times Carmack just wants to get shit done. At Oculus he has worked on both the Minecraft code and the Netflix code both for VR clients, both (I believe, I know for sure for Minecraft at least from some talks) with MS and Netflix retaining full ownership of the code. Maybe they have some "off the record" agreements to avoid anti-trust--Minecraft still hasn't officially come to Vive.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - Bamafan 10y ago
    They also made a number of "free" games that were published by SoftDisk. This was all pre-modern software era though. If that happened today, it would end up very similarly to how the Occulus case ended up.
Zooper 10y ago
I love how it's assumed, taken as axiom, instead of absurdity, that it's even possible for a company to own a individual's time and mind by contract.
- daenz 10y ago
  Believe me, I'm on your side about that. However, the reports stated he used company resources.
- deelowe 10y ago
  John was able to do the demo at E3 due to his employment at Zenimax, Carmack used company resources to work on the product, and Carmack was able to source talent from zenimax due to his employment at the company. None of this has anything to do with Zenimax owning his "mind" or "time." It's about Carmack using company resources to enable Oculus. This becomes even more concerning when you consider that Carmack was one of their most senior, if not THE most senior engineer at the company. He's compensated handsomely under the assumption that any great ideas he has will end up with the company. This is similar to executive compensation strategies and carries with it very similar assumptions. The situation is a little more than some ordinary employee exploring their hobby and getting lucky. This is like a CEO getting hired, being awarded a multi-hundred million dollar contract, not doing a single thing for the company that hired him, advertising for a competitor, leaving once his contract is up and also convincing numerous other executives to leave with him at the same time. That's extremely unethical in my opinion. How much all that is worth is debatable, but the court seems to think it was worth $500M.
  - jackmott 10y ago
    he enabled Zenimax's game to run on an oculus. zenimax didn't have a VR headset to sell, or plans to make one Imagine if this story was about carmack getting access to a playstation 4, and helping improve it and doing a demo of Doom on PS4. that...is what he is supposed to do!
    - sangnoir 10y ago
sfifs 10y ago
> What in the world was Carmack doing, working on another company's project, using your current company's time and resources? The same thing he was doing when starting Id software working for another company a couple of decades ago.
nl 10y ago
Read the stories about how he wanted to work on the Occulus version of Minecraft, and how focused he was on making sure he could do that. There didn't appear to be much caution there, either.
erikpukinskis 10y ago
What, like writing GLQuake for 3dfx cards? He was a game programmer. He was porting his company's game to upcoming hardware. I fail to see what's even a tiny bit inappropriate about that.
puranjay 10y ago
Honestly, Carmack sounds like he is smitten with VR/Oculus, at least in the earlier videos. I don't think he was treating this very rationally...it was like love

by daenz 10y ago

legodt 10y ago

I don't think Carmack works that way. All he really cares about professionally (I'm not talking about his personal life or rocketry) is doing good work and pushing his code to the limits of the field. Oculus hardware was a big coding challenge without much marked territory or set rules for Carmack, so that's probably the only thing he was thinking about while working.

bishnu 10y ago
If he does, he's come a long way from the John Carmack that consistently open-sourced his 3D engines and followed up with developers who failed to abide by the GPL [0]. (I don't think he works the way you describe at all). [0] https://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/finger.pl?id=1&time=20000223184151 https://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/finger.pl?id=1&time=200002...

leggomylibro 10y ago

Some alarm bells probably did go off, but they were probably silenced fairly quickly with something along the lines of, "but this is really cool and I want to work on it. Plus, it's not like my employer is actively working on a VR that I'd be competing with." And at the end of the day, Carmack isn't the one who is out $500M, is he?

jMyles 10y ago
In retrospect, he came out smelling like roses.
spatulon 10y ago
He is personally out $150m, according to the article.
- Idontagree 10y ago
  That seems like a lot, I didn't think he was worth that much, maybe I'm undervaluing his net worth. Is there a value for that anywhere?
  - gpderetta 10y ago
    Well, he had to stop playing with rockets as he was running out of FU money...
  - stupidcar 10y ago
    He presumably got a sizeable chunk of Oculus shares when he joined as CTO, and those would have been converted to a valuable amount of Facebook equity during the $3bn buyout. Kind of irrelevant though, as the article is wrong, and it's actually Luckey and Iribe who are personally liable, and not Carmack.
- teej 10y ago
  The Variety article says Carmack but the TechCrunch article says Iribe. I'm having trouble finding the actual source.
  - k-t 10y ago
    The court documents say Iribe. Carmack took his emails with him on a USB stick (which Zenimax's lawyer called "10,000 confidential documents") but the jury didn't award any damages for that.

JohnDotAwesome 10y ago

There's a story in Masters of Doom where Carmack and Romero do just that. If I recall correctly, they would take company (Softdisk I believe) computers at night because they were more powerful than their home computers, and use them to develop their own games. I think they even worked on their own games on company time. I might be getting the details wrong on that one, but sounds like Carmack dgaf (or just doesn't think about how these things could potentially be wrong/misaligned).

jfolkins 10y ago
LOVE THIS BOOK! And you are correct, they indeed "borrowed" the machines.
Mizza 10y ago
Carmack is way more of a badass punk than his demeanor makes him out to be. When he was 14, he got sentenced to a year in juvie for stealing his school's Apple IIs. He broke in using thermite. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack#Early_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack#Early_life
cma 10y ago
I believe they settled it by paying some royalties on Commander Keen. A lot of times Carmack just wants to get shit done. At Oculus he has worked on both the Minecraft code and the Netflix code both for VR clients, both (I believe, I know for sure for Minecraft at least from some talks) with MS and Netflix retaining full ownership of the code. Maybe they have some "off the record" agreements to avoid anti-trust--Minecraft still hasn't officially come to Vive.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Bamafan 10y ago
  They also made a number of "free" games that were published by SoftDisk. This was all pre-modern software era though. If that happened today, it would end up very similarly to how the Occulus case ended up.

Zooper 10y ago

I love how it's assumed, taken as axiom, instead of absurdity, that it's even possible for a company to own a individual's time and mind by contract.

daenz 10y ago
Believe me, I'm on your side about that. However, the reports stated he used company resources.
deelowe 10y ago
John was able to do the demo at E3 due to his employment at Zenimax, Carmack used company resources to work on the product, and Carmack was able to source talent from zenimax due to his employment at the company. None of this has anything to do with Zenimax owning his "mind" or "time." It's about Carmack using company resources to enable Oculus. This becomes even more concerning when you consider that Carmack was one of their most senior, if not THE most senior engineer at the company. He's compensated handsomely under the assumption that any great ideas he has will end up with the company. This is similar to executive compensation strategies and carries with it very similar assumptions. The situation is a little more than some ordinary employee exploring their hobby and getting lucky. This is like a CEO getting hired, being awarded a multi-hundred million dollar contract, not doing a single thing for the company that hired him, advertising for a competitor, leaving once his contract is up and also convincing numerous other executives to leave with him at the same time. That's extremely unethical in my opinion. How much all that is worth is debatable, but the court seems to think it was worth $500M.
- jackmott 10y ago
  he enabled Zenimax's game to run on an oculus. zenimax didn't have a VR headset to sell, or plans to make one Imagine if this story was about carmack getting access to a playstation 4, and helping improve it and doing a demo of Doom on PS4. that...is what he is supposed to do!
  - sangnoir 10y ago

sfifs 10y ago

> What in the world was Carmack doing, working on another company's project, using your current company's time and resources? The same thing he was doing when starting Id software working for another company a couple of decades ago.

nl 10y ago

Read the stories about how he wanted to work on the Occulus version of Minecraft, and how focused he was on making sure he could do that. There didn't appear to be much caution there, either.

erikpukinskis 10y ago

What, like writing GLQuake for 3dfx cards? He was a game programmer. He was porting his company's game to upcoming hardware. I fail to see what's even a tiny bit inappropriate about that.

puranjay 10y ago

Honestly, Carmack sounds like he is smitten with VR/Oculus, at least in the earlier videos. I don't think he was treating this very rationally...it was like love