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John Carmack Leaves Meta

• hit8run 4y ago
  OG Facebook Post by Carmack: ``` 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”! ```
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• pipeline_peak 4y ago
  Musk on VR https://youtu.be/Ai-gJQ99ci0 https://youtu.be/Ai-gJQ99ci0 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? VR is a fad that comes and goes.
• fuckHNtho 4y ago
  All we're seeing here is the continuation of people with the means distancing themselves from the toxic brand. This and the excuses people make for still working there draw hilarious parallels with the Nazis.
• joanfihu 4y ago
  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.
• dickersnoodle 4y ago
  "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.
• steve_adams_86 4y ago
  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.
  • santoshalper 4y ago
    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.
    • Aeolun 4y ago
      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.
      • pjmorris 4y ago
        Jerry Weinberg had an expression "Cucumbers get pickled more than brine gets cucumbered" to express the influence environment has on individuals.
    • JohnFen 4y ago
      Of the many things that cooled my interest in VR, the presence of Facebook in the space is near the top.
      • sharkweek 4y ago
        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.
• jyap 4y ago
  https://archive.ph/sfnzN https://archive.ph/sfnzN
  • dang 4y ago
    We've since changed the URL from https://www.businessinsider.com/john-carmack-meta-consulting-cto-virtual-reality-leaving-2022-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/john-carmack-meta-consulting..., which that URL is a copy of. to the letter that everyone is responding to.
• modeless 4y ago
  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. Edit: he posted his leaving message publicly here: https://www.facebook.com/100006735798590/posts/pfbid0iPixEvPJQGzNa6t2x6HUL5TYqfmKGqSgfkBg6QaTyHF5frXQi7eLGxC7uPQv5U5jl/ https://www.facebook.com/100006735798590/posts/pfbid0iPixEvP... Additional public comments on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1603931901491908610 https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1603931901491908610 > 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. @dang can you change the link to one of these?
  • ladyattis 4y ago
    >he's planning for an AGI company. 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.
• JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  “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.
  • joenathanone 4y ago
    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.
    • LarsDu88 4y ago
      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. The incentive to spend all your time politicking your way up the massive corporate ladder outweighs the incentive to improve the actual product: https://mentalmodels4life.net/2021/01/04/safi-bahcalls-innovation-equation/ https://mentalmodels4life.net/2021/01/04/safi-bahcalls-innov... There's even an equation that describes this phenomenon
      • JohnFen 4y ago
        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.
• srajabi 4y ago
  Basically Carmack is frustrated by: 1. Rate of progress on AR/VR at meta 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."
  • Razengan 4y ago
    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.
    • fudgefactorfive 4y ago
      I completely agree with this sentiment. 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.
• sxg 4y ago
  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. [1] https://lexfridman.com/john-carmack/ https://lexfridman.com/john-carmack/
  • nebulous1 4y ago
    Lex's guest list is absurd. I'm honestly not sure how he's managed to pull it off.
    • strikelaserclaw 4y ago
      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.
    • pyinstallwoes 4y ago
      Who else can bridge the neurotypical spectrum? Maybe Eric Weinstein from the portal but he stopped that.
      • whimsicalism 4y ago
        Is that the finance guy who claimed he solved a theory of everything for physics? This whole section of the so-called "intellectual dark web" should be treated with lots of skepticism.
        • pyinstallwoes 4y ago
          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.
• etchalon 4y ago
  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.
  • coffeebeqn 4y ago
    He’s probably the best graphics programmer in the world so I would trust his read on the priorities over whatever Meta manager handles that project
    • Gigachad 4y ago
      Given the fact that the metaverse is widely mocked for looking like a Wii game, they probably do need to spend more time on graphics.
      • nomel 4y ago
        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.
    • Philip-J-Fry 4y ago
      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.
  • this_user 4y ago
    > He seemed to be focused on latency and scale, where Meta seems to be pivoting to fidelity and graphics. Which makes sense, you want your users to be able to really take in the graphical glory of the Metaverse.
• cokeandpepsi 4y ago
  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
  • 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
    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.
    • salawat 4y ago
      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.
  • Gigachad 4y ago
    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
    • torben-friis 4y ago
      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?
      • nomel 4y ago
        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.
• fuzzythinker 4y ago
• habibur 4y ago
  He was talking about working on AI the other day. Artificial general intelligence "or die" type of challenge taking. Guess he's getting full time busy with that.
  • tomxor 4y ago
    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.
• shp0ngle 4y ago
  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. Well, I guess not anymore.
  • javchz 4y ago
    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.
    • shp0ngle 4y ago
      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.
  • darknavi 4y ago
    He was wholey un-corporate. So refreshing and real. Really shows what that brings to a corporate shitshow that is Meta.
  • 4y ago
• paxys 4y ago
  He didn't have much of a role anyways. His title was "consulting CTO". He has primarily been running his own startup for a while now.
• bradhe 4y ago
  Bye bye. In to bigger and better.
• stephc_int13 4y ago
  I am not surprised. He is not leaving Meta to focus on AGI and build a new company. This is other way around, he is so tired and disgusted that he is throwing the towel and focusing on something else. This is not a vote of confidence.
• WheelsAtLarge 4y ago
  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.
• ojbyrne 4y ago
  I'm going to guess that there was an earnout that expired.
• Arjuna 4y ago
  ”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.
  • throwaway99rtq 4y ago
    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.
  • fennecfoxy 4y ago
    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.
  • posharma 4y ago
• pengaru 4y ago
  "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. Edit: Just look at Carmack's wikipedia page FFS, he hasn't been credited for design since SOFTDISK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack#Games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack#Games
  • bombcar 4y ago
    People take “game designer” to mean “anyone who worked on one of them thar computer game things”.
  • yellow_lead 4y ago
    It's business insider so
  • javchz 4y ago
    That's like calling Schwarzenegger a GYM owner... I mean yeah it's not a lie, but it's underselling a lot.
• DonHopkins 4y ago
  The whole message posted to Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=pfbid0iPixEvPJQGzNa6t2x6HUL5TYqfmKGqSgfkBg6QaTyHF5frXQi7eLGxC7uPQv5U5jl&id=100006735798590 https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=pfbid0iPix...
• DonHopkins 4y ago
  The real world welcomes you back, John!
• Patrol8394 4y ago
  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.
• staunch 4y ago
  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.
• DonHopkins 4y ago
  Godspeed John! I sure hope your next project has legs! ;)
• gordoclark 4y ago
• lostgame 4y ago
  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?
  • runevault 4y ago
    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.
• knighthack 4y ago
  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.
• daguava 4y ago
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • cnlwsu 4y ago
    Meta is a different company and this has nothing to do with Twitter…
• yedpodtrzitko 4y ago
  I'm surprised/sad he didnt decide to join Valve. VR is a big bet for them as well and I'd assume he'd have more freedom/power there than in Meta.
  • TheDudeMan 4y ago
    At his age and level, you lose all interest in having a boss.
• boulos 4y ago
  The actual memo is at https://archive.vn/Lmu9g https://archive.vn/Lmu9g which is more interesting than the summary.
• flipgimble 4y ago
  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.
  • harryVic 4y ago
    It is a fad. No one really wants this. Just like 3d TVs the novelty fades away after a few hours.
• kelsolaar 4y ago
  From his Facebook account: 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”!
• solardev 4y ago
  I hope he joins Valve instead. Facebook was the wrong choice from the get go.
  • TheDudeMan 4y ago
    He didn't chose Facebook. At the time of the Oculus acquisition, they must have made him an offer he couldn't refuse.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• xwowsersx 4y ago
  Relevant: The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to "The Office" https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
• Havoc 4y ago
  Was always a bit of an odd fit
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• quakeguy 4y ago
  Zeitenwende.
• rkaregaran 4y ago
  Carmack addressing the leak of his internal memo, and notably, sharing his next goal of achieving AGI at Keen Technologies. https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1603931905539325955?s=46&t=rZUCvwAu8-dtlp5XkuF6LQ https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1603931905539325955...
• abraxas 4y ago
  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.
• posharma 4y ago
  "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.
• htrp 4y ago
  I wonder how much of this is the result of a over bloated product management arm.....
• jbverschoor 4y ago
  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.
  • afterburner 4y ago
    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.
• telotortium 4y ago
  Updated archive: https://archive.vn/TQg2r https://archive.vn/TQg2r
• smrtinsert 4y ago
  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.
• branko_d 4y ago
  This was quite poetic IMO: "When you work hard at optimization for most of your life, seeing something that is grossly inefficient hurts your soul." - John Carmack https://www.facebook.com/100006735798590/posts/pfbid0iPixEvPJQGzNa6t2x6HUL5TYqfmKGqSgfkBg6QaTyHF5frXQi7eLGxC7uPQv5U5jl/ https://www.facebook.com/100006735798590/posts/pfbid0iPixEvP...
• manucardoen 4y ago
  You can find John Carmack's full post here: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=pfbid0iPixEvPJQGzNa6t2x6HUL5TYqfmKGqSgfkBg6QaTyHF5frXQi7eLGxC7uPQv5U5jl&id=100006735798590 https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=pfbid0iPix...
• kensai 4y ago
  What is this new startup he will be working in? Has he disclosed?
  • devmunchies 4y ago
    https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/19/john-carmack-agi-keen-raises-20-million-from-sequoia-nat-friedman-and-others/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/19/john-carmack-agi-keen-rais...
• drummer 4y ago
  Should never have joined the dumpster fire that is facebook. Dispicable company.
• macrolime 4y ago
  Read Carmack's full memo: 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!"
• joaoqalves 4y ago
  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.
• inglor_cz 4y ago
  Carmack is a developer god, but against stupidity, the very gods themselves contend in vain.
• conceptme 4y ago
  The metaverse is a castle in the sky nobody can make it what Meta or John Carmack wants it to be.
• turbobooster 4y ago
• OOPMan 4y ago
  "VR can bring value to most of the people in the world, and no one is better positioned to do it than Meta." I'm now concerned for Carmacks sanity...
• lerax 4y ago
  Too much brain for so bad purpose. I am glad that Carmack makes his move to go forward. He is a brilliant programmer.
• stodor89 4y ago
  I'm happy for him. The AI field is making things happen. VR has potential, but as of 2022, almost everything about it is hot garbage.
• AtNightWeCode 4y ago
  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.
• ezoe 4y ago
  It took longer than I thought. The best timing for him was when Facebook purchased Oculus.
• leeoniya 4y ago
  > [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 yikes, is it that low?
  • WA 4y ago
    So what do you use? Vanilla JS?
    • leeoniya 4y ago
      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.html 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.
  • ericmcer 4y ago
    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.
• baby 4y ago
  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.
  • troupe 4y ago
    > You’re supposed to lead without authority 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.
    • heather45879 4y ago
      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.
• poszlem 4y ago
  • _cs2017_ 4y ago
    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.
    • eternalban 4y ago
      "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.
  • randomdata 4y ago
    > 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.
  • jleyank 4y ago
    If it was the left wing driving Facebook it would not collect so much data. They’re the ones who wrote about big brother, not the other guys.
    • 4y ago
• bottlepalm 4y ago
  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. Bah humbug.
• quitit 4y ago
  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.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• drewg123 4y ago
  "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.
  • joeyrideout 4y ago
    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 :)
  • slickrick216 4y ago
    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.
    • theteapot 4y ago
      > 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?
• gerash 4y ago
  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
• killjoywashere 4y ago
  I don't use facebook. Is this reposted somewhere?
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • rgrmrts 4y ago
    Full memo is reproduced here https://archive.vn/Lmu9g https://archive.vn/Lmu9g
• c7DJTLrn 4y ago
  I'm surprised he's able to be this open about it. Wouldn't his contract have a non-disparagement clause?
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• option 4y ago
  Can someone please paste the letter? I haven’t had fb account for years now.
  • tomalaci 4y ago
    Check https://pastebin.com/Jk5TrGch https://pastebin.com/Jk5TrGch
• tomalaci 4y ago
  For those who don't want to view Facebook post (or can't login to it). I created pastebin of his resignation post: https://pastebin.com/Jk5TrGch https://pastebin.com/Jk5TrGch Also, the other discussion (700+ comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34022484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34022484
  • dang 4y ago
    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.
  • alpaca128 4y ago
    Switching to reader mode also works.
• monero-xmr 4y ago
  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.
  • SicSemperUranus 4y ago
    Finding good devs is hard enough without a dictatorial style of leadership. I find that people like democracy, for some reason.
    • stuven 4y ago
      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.
    • operatingthetan 4y ago
      >I find that people like democracy, 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.
    • aiwv 4y ago
      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).
• tlarkworthy 4y ago
  Seems a little off to be calling out perf metrics when the whole system hasn't found product-market fit yet
  • Jolter 4y ago
    5% is a metaphor. Read that part again.
    • tlarkworthy 4y ago
      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.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• krisoft 4y ago
  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. :)
  • LarsDu88 4y ago
    Yeah this was really odd to read? 5% gpu utilization on your battery hungry mobile device? That's not bad it's good/bad??
  • Nimitz14 4y ago
    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.
• flappyeagle 4y ago
  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.
• shafinsiddique 4y ago
  Can someone explain me the 5% GPU utilization issue
  • brezelgoring 4y ago
    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.
    • didibus 4y ago
      I don't think that's what he meant. 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.
      • brezelgoring 4y ago
        I interpreted it too literally, you're probably right. Ultimately we're talking about the same thing, here. Good day, didibus!
  • tgmatt 4y ago
    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.
• softwaredoug 4y ago
  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.
• giardini 4y ago
  I have to login to facebook to view this?
  • sowbug 4y ago
    No. It works fine without cookies.
    • giardini 4y ago
      Nope, the url given always redirects me to log into Facebook. I cannot view the article.
      • sowbug 4y ago
        Just tried again, Chrome incognito. Works for me.
• LarsDu88 4y ago
  I'm going to link this because it's relevant. Safi Bahcall wrote of this phenomenon: https://mentalmodels4life.net/2021/01/04/safi-bahcalls-innovation-equation/ https://mentalmodels4life.net/2021/01/04/safi-bahcalls-innov... 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
• jp57 4y ago
  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.
• birdymcbird 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
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• cletus 4y ago
  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. Disclaimer: ex-Facebooker.
  • justbored123 4y ago
• naillo 4y ago
  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%.
  • kleinsch 4y ago
    He's not literally talking about 5% GPU utilization. It's a metaphor for the eng org being inefficient.
• baal80spam 4y ago
  For those without FB/Reader mode: 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”!
• iambateman 4y ago
  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.
• ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
  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.
• dang 4y ago
  We changed the URL from https://www.businessinsider.com/john-carmack-meta-consulting-cto-virtual-reality-leaving-2022-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/john-carmack-meta-consulting... to the letter that everyone is responding to. A copy is at https://pastebin.com/Jk5TrGch https://pastebin.com/Jk5TrGch (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34030288 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34030288 - thanks!)
• ryloric 4y ago
  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.
• colinsane 4y ago
  even the best of us vaguepost, huh? 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.
• Shorel 4y ago
  Good. He deserves better. I still wait for when he moves to Valve.
• dumbotron 4y ago
  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.
  • wweburg 4y ago
    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.
• antman 4y ago
  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.
• jasonhansel 4y ago
  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.
• AceJohnny2 4y ago
  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).
  • bagels 4y ago
    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.
• m3kw9 4y ago
  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
• blobbers 4y ago
  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.
• wucaworld 4y ago
  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.
• methods21 4y ago
  With Carmack's amazing talent and vision, unless FB changed somehow, FB is no place for the great Carmack! Keep programming brother, leave the BS politics to the plebs, and go back out there with YOUR team an fing kill it!!!!
• swellguy 4y ago
  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.
• Waterluvian 4y ago
  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.
• ugh123 4y ago
  From his tweets.. >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?s=20&t=BtYUFO8CBLEkBqGwUqC9tQ 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.
• mikestaub 4y ago
  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-for-500-million-in-zenimax-vr-trial/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/02/oculus-execs-liable-f...
• b20000 4y ago
  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.
• ur-whale 4y ago
  > I have a voice at the highest levels here, so it feels like I should be able to move things John discovers that steering a supertanker is different from driving a motorcycle.
• jojobas 4y ago
  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.
• iguana_lawyer 4y ago
• jshaqaw 4y ago
  TLDR: It’s everyone’s fault but mine