4 ms·

so sure. oculus is cool. i even know a few people working there; they're smart dudes. but. they're being managed by an organization whose ops group can't rem

so sure. oculus is cool. i even know a few people working there; they're smart dudes. but. they're being managed by an organization whose ops group can't remember to renew certs and whose marketing group thinks it's cool to demo first person shooters at NRA events the day after a mass shooting where you play the part of a deranged mass shooter killing random people on a train platform. as smart as the tech guys are, the organizational + business guys aren't really the sharpest tools in the drawer.

uniacid 9y ago
Agreed, also yeah I still don't see AR being used in everyday life still, maybe for a few applications but it still feels like just a cool tech "fad" right now, plus still very expensive for your everyday consumer.
- jjoonathan 9y ago
  Right, but once it becomes cheap and tasteful, and it eventually will, then the first company to implement "recognize face -> socially useful annotations" wins the next round of the social network game. If facebook misses the mark, they die. Life support for occulus is a cheap hedge against an existential threat.
  - 908087 9y ago
    How would the people walking around with cameras on their faces feeding facial recognition data to Facebook inform those who end up in their line of sight that they had unknowingly agreed to Facebook's privacy policy by being there?
yathern 9y ago
> demo first person shooters at NRA events the day after a mass shooting where you play the part of a deranged mass shooter killing random people on a train platform Do you have a source for this?
- sp332 9y ago
  It wasn't the day after, but it was less than 10 days after. The students had just started going back to school. https://twitter.com/snmrrw/status/967136708058927104 https://twitter.com/snmrrw/status/967136708058927104 Also it wasn't an NRA event, but the NRA did speak at CPAC this year.
  - yathern 9y ago
    Thanks for the link - it turns out it was also not a game where you > play the part of a deranged mass shooter killing random people on a train platform It's just a regular shooter game with some novel time-warp mechanics in it, that happens to take place in a futuristic train station.
thanatropism 9y ago
I know this isn't exactly what you're saying (the timing with the mass shooting is, well, a shot in the foot), but it kind of reads like "Oculus has the wrong politics". To be clear: I'm not saying you are consciously condemning Oculus for having the wrong politics, but maybe the right politics/wrong politics angle is coloring your view of the business world. Which it shouldn't.
throwaway001923 9y ago
I had a bad interview experience with Oculus. This was fairly early on in their history, before the acquisition and before Carmack joined. First interview was scheduled at a not-so-great time (I was in a different timezone, which they knew, but didn't seem to care enough to pick a less inconvenient time). My interviewer never showed up on skype. They apologized, rescheduled (I insisted on a more reasonable time). The interviewer showed up quite late, and only one of the two showed up. It went well, but had to schedule a follow up with the other one. That one went well also. We eventually got to the point where I was talking to HR about specifics of the offer, and everyone went completely silent. I tried to follow up a few times, but never heard back. I assume they found someone else, but have the respect to write back. Years later, I watched one of Carmack's talk and one of his complaints was just how bad they (he had joined Oculus at this point) were at stores infrastructure, discovery and payment and all of that. Seems pretty clear to me there's problem inside the non-core engineering aspect of the company.
- bitexploder 9y ago
  This is easy. Business is hard. Hacking is fun. As a founder you desperately don't want to deal with all of the annoying parts of being a business owner. You just want to hack and do the point of your place, not deal with pesky "business" things. I am talking simple things like taxes, etc. If you let that mentality bleed into things like setting up every part of your organization to be awesome you get this siloing effect. If you are a ONLY HIRE A-PLAYERS type company, that doesn't mean only hire great engineers. It means everyone needs to be great at what they do. Including HR, operations, etc. A lot of companies with super smart guys miss this. They still go on to success but I know from experience and at least a couple of friends that went very large in valuation and growth on the typical startup path that not taking more time on their company culture and instilling their values in ALL of the organization before it went meteoric caused them no end of grief and made them dislike their company, even though they built awesome engineering organization at the end of it all. (edit: sample size of two from personal experience, but based on observation, this seems almost axiomatic based on how so many startups go when you read their stories)
whywhywhywhy 9y ago
> where you play the part of a deranged mass shooter killing random people on a train platform It's robots[0] not "random people", but yeah lets not let facts get in the way of your editorialising. [0] https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Bullet-Train-VR-Demo.jpg https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Bul...
- onion2k 9y ago
  It's people and robots. https://www.oculus.com/experiences/rift/980771811959458/ https://www.oculus.com/experiences/rift/980771811959458/
- ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
  It was also a week later. Not the day after. https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/26/17054392/facebook-cpac-oculus-bullet-train-vr-shooter-florida-apology https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/26/17054392/facebook-cpac-oc... What I don't understand (beyond why Facebook would be at CPAC to begin with....) is why they would demo 'Bullet Train' in 2018. This demo was considered too much of a murder simulator, and eventually became the VERY POPULAR game ROBO RECALL in 2016. In that game the guns are much more sci-fi, and it eliminates many of the violence concerns. It's an awesome game. Why didn't they bring that instead of a ~4yr old demo?
golergka 9y ago
> it's cool to demo first person shooters at NRA events the day after a mass shooting where you play the part of a deranged mass shooter killing random people on a train platform Sounds much cooler than hypocritically cancelling an event just because of the unfortunate news cycle.
askafriend 9y ago
I'm sure you had a valuable point to make but the blatant inaccuracy in your comment distracts from any effectiveness your point may have had. * It was a game killing random robots, not people. * It wasn't an NRA event, it was CPAC where the NRA was one of many presenters. * It was not the day after, it was a week after. You could argue that these are minor errors, but that's not the point. You've already tarnished your credibility so it's hard to take anything else you retort with at face value. It's unfortunate because I think you had a decent point about optics.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- mediocrejoker 9y ago
  The "person" in "first person shooter" refers to the narrative perspective of the player (ie. first person, third person) and not the species that is being "shot at"
  - monktastic1 9y ago
    FWIW: > where you play the part of a deranged mass shooter killing random people on a train platform
- homonculus1 9y ago
  They're also not "random", they're an armed SWAT military/police squad. Even if they were humans, it would be "Half Life 2", not "No Russian".
Mahn 9y ago
Mistakes happen, people are human. I don't know that is fair to judge everything Oculus and Facebook are doing based on a couple of incidents; every company, good or bad, large or small, is bound to suffer from minor mishaps occasionally.

uniacid 9y ago

Agreed, also yeah I still don't see AR being used in everyday life still, maybe for a few applications but it still feels like just a cool tech "fad" right now, plus still very expensive for your everyday consumer.

jjoonathan 9y ago
Right, but once it becomes cheap and tasteful, and it eventually will, then the first company to implement "recognize face -> socially useful annotations" wins the next round of the social network game. If facebook misses the mark, they die. Life support for occulus is a cheap hedge against an existential threat.
- 908087 9y ago
  How would the people walking around with cameras on their faces feeding facial recognition data to Facebook inform those who end up in their line of sight that they had unknowingly agreed to Facebook's privacy policy by being there?

yathern 9y ago

> demo first person shooters at NRA events the day after a mass shooting where you play the part of a deranged mass shooter killing random people on a train platform Do you have a source for this?

sp332 9y ago
It wasn't the day after, but it was less than 10 days after. The students had just started going back to school. https://twitter.com/snmrrw/status/967136708058927104 https://twitter.com/snmrrw/status/967136708058927104 Also it wasn't an NRA event, but the NRA did speak at CPAC this year.
- yathern 9y ago
  Thanks for the link - it turns out it was also not a game where you > play the part of a deranged mass shooter killing random people on a train platform It's just a regular shooter game with some novel time-warp mechanics in it, that happens to take place in a futuristic train station.

thanatropism 9y ago

I know this isn't exactly what you're saying (the timing with the mass shooting is, well, a shot in the foot), but it kind of reads like "Oculus has the wrong politics". To be clear: I'm not saying you are consciously condemning Oculus for having the wrong politics, but maybe the right politics/wrong politics angle is coloring your view of the business world. Which it shouldn't.

throwaway001923 9y ago

I had a bad interview experience with Oculus. This was fairly early on in their history, before the acquisition and before Carmack joined. First interview was scheduled at a not-so-great time (I was in a different timezone, which they knew, but didn't seem to care enough to pick a less inconvenient time). My interviewer never showed up on skype. They apologized, rescheduled (I insisted on a more reasonable time). The interviewer showed up quite late, and only one of the two showed up. It went well, but had to schedule a follow up with the other one. That one went well also. We eventually got to the point where I was talking to HR about specifics of the offer, and everyone went completely silent. I tried to follow up a few times, but never heard back. I assume they found someone else, but have the respect to write back. Years later, I watched one of Carmack's talk and one of his complaints was just how bad they (he had joined Oculus at this point) were at stores infrastructure, discovery and payment and all of that. Seems pretty clear to me there's problem inside the non-core engineering aspect of the company.

bitexploder 9y ago
This is easy. Business is hard. Hacking is fun. As a founder you desperately don't want to deal with all of the annoying parts of being a business owner. You just want to hack and do the point of your place, not deal with pesky "business" things. I am talking simple things like taxes, etc. If you let that mentality bleed into things like setting up every part of your organization to be awesome you get this siloing effect. If you are a ONLY HIRE A-PLAYERS type company, that doesn't mean only hire great engineers. It means everyone needs to be great at what they do. Including HR, operations, etc. A lot of companies with super smart guys miss this. They still go on to success but I know from experience and at least a couple of friends that went very large in valuation and growth on the typical startup path that not taking more time on their company culture and instilling their values in ALL of the organization before it went meteoric caused them no end of grief and made them dislike their company, even though they built awesome engineering organization at the end of it all. (edit: sample size of two from personal experience, but based on observation, this seems almost axiomatic based on how so many startups go when you read their stories)

whywhywhywhy 9y ago

> where you play the part of a deranged mass shooter killing random people on a train platform It's robots[0] not "random people", but yeah lets not let facts get in the way of your editorialising. [0] https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Bullet-Train-VR-Demo.jpg https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Bul...

onion2k 9y ago
It's people and robots. https://www.oculus.com/experiences/rift/980771811959458/ https://www.oculus.com/experiences/rift/980771811959458/
ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
It was also a week later. Not the day after. https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/26/17054392/facebook-cpac-oculus-bullet-train-vr-shooter-florida-apology https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/26/17054392/facebook-cpac-oc... What I don't understand (beyond why Facebook would be at CPAC to begin with....) is why they would demo 'Bullet Train' in 2018. This demo was considered too much of a murder simulator, and eventually became the VERY POPULAR game ROBO RECALL in 2016. In that game the guns are much more sci-fi, and it eliminates many of the violence concerns. It's an awesome game. Why didn't they bring that instead of a ~4yr old demo?

golergka 9y ago

> it's cool to demo first person shooters at NRA events the day after a mass shooting where you play the part of a deranged mass shooter killing random people on a train platform Sounds much cooler than hypocritically cancelling an event just because of the unfortunate news cycle.

askafriend 9y ago

I'm sure you had a valuable point to make but the blatant inaccuracy in your comment distracts from any effectiveness your point may have had. * It was a game killing random robots, not people. * It wasn't an NRA event, it was CPAC where the NRA was one of many presenters. * It was not the day after, it was a week after. You could argue that these are minor errors, but that's not the point. You've already tarnished your credibility so it's hard to take anything else you retort with at face value. It's unfortunate because I think you had a decent point about optics.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
mediocrejoker 9y ago
The "person" in "first person shooter" refers to the narrative perspective of the player (ie. first person, third person) and not the species that is being "shot at"
- monktastic1 9y ago
  FWIW: > where you play the part of a deranged mass shooter killing random people on a train platform
homonculus1 9y ago
They're also not "random", they're an armed SWAT military/police squad. Even if they were humans, it would be "Half Life 2", not "No Russian".

Mahn 9y ago

Mistakes happen, people are human. I don't know that is fair to judge everything Oculus and Facebook are doing based on a couple of incidents; every company, good or bad, large or small, is bound to suffer from minor mishaps occasionally.