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Throwaway because it could be easy to identify my position from my normal account name. Carmack is many thing, engineering genius above them. However, he would

Throwaway because it could be easy to identify my position from my normal account name. Carmack is many thing, engineering genius above them. However, he would frequently wade into areas where he had no experience, demand others do what he said, ignore evidence he was wrong, bully people, and disparage entire teams who were doing good, and in some cases legally required, work. When data proved his idea was wrong, he would say words to the effect of "I don't care, because I still believe I'm right from an ideological background". He would devalue people, there expertise, there experience, and there thoughts because "I'm John Carmack". Truthfully, I have never worked with someone before who was somehow so politely toxic to a workplace. Carmacks work in VR was absolutely invaluable from a technical standpoint, but VR now is as successful as it is in spite of his influence, not because of it. When I hear people say "If only Meta would let Carmack do what he wants we'd see his ideal VR experience and it would be amazing". You already saw it. It was Oculus Go, and by every metric is was a commercial, financial, and technical, disaster.

felipellrocha 4y ago
If i had nickel for every time i had been in a conversation where someone “proved they were right” even though they were nowhere near there, ok, i wouldn’t have millions but I’d have somewhere in the $50s which is a lot higher than you’d expect
petee 4y ago
Is VR really successful? Because it seems like its been floundering for years, and still hasn't learned to walk yet. And your example in a way backs up what Carmack is saying -- nobody listened, and Oculus sucks, as you pointed out.
nullc 4y ago
> and in some cases legally required, work Are we talking EMI compliance or surveillance backdoors? :)
mkrecny 4y ago
creativenolo 4y ago
Thanks for sharing this point of view and voice from inside Meta.
heavenlyblue 4y ago
loco5niner 4y ago
I definitely saw a lot of that in him when I read "Masters of Doom".
eyko 4y ago
- earthnail 4y ago
  Big corps usually prohibit their employees from expressing their personal opinions. It’s sometimes tolerated but always against the employment contract. So whenever you’re saying something, bigcorp could decide that “this one’s too far”. On a topic with as much PR as this one, it’s rather dangerous to comment on if you gave a medium-to-high level position. The reason big corps do it is so that their PR department has ANY chance of sending a coherent message. So it’s not even evil behaviour IMHO. All that to say, I understand why they used an anonymous account. Of course, that doesn’t mean one has to believe them, it’s their word against Carmack’s. But it’s good to hear that perspective IMO.
  - vintermann 4y ago
    > Big corps usually prohibit their employees from expressing their personal opinions. Yes, but does that make it any better though? We understand why they have to do it anonymously, but it's still someone with nothing at stake, who we can't evaluate the claims of.
    - dvzk 4y ago
      I'm not sure there is much of substance to evaluate. If we fired every technical lead who sometimes "waded into areas with no experience," issued orders, followed a conviction or two and occasionally provided disparaging feedback, there would be no good engineers left. The bullying and devaluing claims are worth investigation, but that's always very subjective and range from "my boss disagrees with me" to horrific abuse.
  - johnnyanmac 4y ago
    I don't disagree, and I was in a similar position not too long ago. But it also doesn't change the fact that this is ultimately hearsay. Maybe this was someone who butted heads and ultimately had the better idea go by the wayside because they lacked clout. Maybe they are a gilted employee whose full story would make them feel like how they described Carmack. We don't know and on the internet it's way too easy to pretend to that sabetour who never even worked at Meta but is very angry about some design decision in Quake 3. There's ultimately no good way to do PR as a non-PR employee for that reason, even if the big corp allowed it. You either put your name on the line or you just say nothing. Most employees choose the latter. Your best bet if you have any real evidence and want impact is to seek a journalist for coverage and anonymity. Anything else is simply a footnote to keep in mind until (if ever) some big bust happened.
jimmySixDOF 4y ago
He was alone on his side of the table for the All In One integrated hardware approach that was the Go and became the Quest and, after years, proved to be the right long term direction. Of course that is out of his mouth according to him but, if true, it is the kind of high level strategy setting that separates market leaders from the also ran's. Very different from task level involvement but friction there should be separate from effectiveness at the CTO's desk level (& I have to guess Boz is the one who's quality of life got improved more than specific engineering teams)
kubb 4y ago
HN is all about that cult of personality, we want to believe in heroic programmers (or founders) who singlehandedly change the world with their geinus clarity. Paul Graham said this, John Carmack said that and we lap it all up. It's been this way since the ancient times, and the stories of Hercules and Theseus. We mythologize these personalities, and in our mind they become demigods. But there's a reason the folk wisdom tells you to never meet your heroes. When you do, you painfully realize that the stories didn't focus on their humanity but instead were spinning the myths of their divinity. The person in your head is a source of inspiration. The person in the world, on which the former is based, is a source of disappointment.
- HellDunkel 4y ago
  Well said but we don’t know for sure if the above is true. Carmack is a genious programmer and rather than trash him right away we should acknowledge that his job was hard- very hard. In any biography the failures are way more interesting than the successes. The ancient greek understood that pretty well.
- johnnyanmac 4y ago
  Carmack aside, I think the "never meet your heroes" thing is even simpler: no one's perfect. Your hero could have cured cancer but maybe they're a nervous wreck in public. Or aren't native to your area and may commuicate badly face to face for culture clashing reasons. Or maybe they are great in a small intimate team but completely fall apart in a large setting. Heck it could be as simple as finding out they are a heavy smoker or an alcoholic. The common stereotype is "heroes are narcissitic and have skeletons in the closet", but there are valid reasons for an otherwise good person to fail in what may be common sense to others.
  - sundvor 4y ago
    To me it would be the opposite; we all have our faults, so how do they manage the feats that they do? There's no point idolizing people for their accomplishments in the "they must be perfect" kind of way. Ie I look at John and see someone amazingly fit for their age (very close to mine - only a few years older, yet he appears younger); I'd like to learn more about his routines (running and judo?) to see how I might benefit from the same.
trevyn 4y ago
Why was the Oculus Go considered a failure?
- fsiefken 4y ago
  I think he meant commercially, technically (ideologically?) for me it was an amazing iphone/ipad like innovation - integrating samsung gear in one standalone easy to use package. I'd still use it for certain apps. https://www.reddit.com/r/OculusGo/comments/rnphlq/was_the_oculus_go_was_made_for_failure/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OculusGo/comments/rnphlq/was_the_oc... Oculus Go formed one of the starting points for 6DOF mobile VR (even though the Quest1 'Santa Cruz' was already in development). If the comment was truthful, here it shows some bias. There are always multiple sides to a story.
iforgotpassword 4y ago
Yeah well, you're anonymous, so you might as well be someone with a huge ego who got their idea shut down by Carmack once and is still bitter about it. More often than not, when people think they "prove something wrong with data" it's more that they're "taking some data and interpret in a way that fits their standpoint". Carmack has proven enough times in the past that he's able to deliver, that he can push technology, knows what's possible and what isn't, and can wrap up a product. "Wading into fields he has no experience in" sounds pretty unlikely for VR given his past work. And I wouldn't consider the Oculus Go a failure, more like ahead of it's time and released too early. A prototype of the quest. But I guess now it's easy to claim everything that's bad about the go was Carmack's work and everything good about the quest and quest 2 was someone else's.
- salawat 4y ago
  >Carmack has proven enough times in the past that he's able to deliver, that he can push technology, knows what's possible and what isn't, and can wrap up a product. In the finance world, lesson number 1 is past performance is not a predictor of future results. I don't care how much of a virtuoso you are, if you clash with culture, you're fucked. I'm just coming out of a similar stint where the best I could do was hold off a predilection toward toxic culture norms long enough for processes to materialize. To support the business in spite of it. So I know exactly the kind of forces he was probably working against. It's rather thankless, draining, and exhausting in a way sleep doesn't help with. It's often bidirectional as well, so there's a trick to figuring out when it's time to bounce.
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  This was my interpretation as well.
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  >has proven enough times in the past Past experiences do not mean future success. This isn't even about Carmack: past 'heroes' end up failing in their decision-making in the future many times, and they were followed for no other reason than 'they have a track record'. The sooner that myth dies, the better.
CynicusRex 4y ago
- ben_w 4y ago
  We're you trying to use a throwaway account for that? Because I think you used your main.
  - thetoon 4y ago
    Weren't he rather addressing the "throwaway" user's comment?
Mistletoe 4y ago
Maybe Oculus Go was a failure in all those areas because VR will always be a failure in those areas.
- danuker 4y ago
  Indeed. I couldn't believe Facebook bet so much on VR, and especially a low-quality 3D MMORPG full of micropayments. With no LEGS. How long have video game characters had legs?? I feel dizzy even playing Minecraft on a plain screen. I won't ever buy VR goggles. Let alone ones bound to a Facebook account.
  - cloverich 4y ago
    I've heard they bet on VR for the same reason Microsoft bet on a mobile phone -- they want to own a device ecosystem. It makes a lot more sense to me in that context.
  - eddiewithzato 4y ago
    Zuck must’ve been high when OKing VR, I still think Google Glass is the way forward with augmented reality. Very comfortable and isn’t trying to rewrite how humans communicate. I have VR and it is immersive, but way too uncomfortable.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - annadane 4y ago
      He's not high, he's been treating people like contempt ever since Harvard, this isn't new
    - ghaff 4y ago
      If you imagine arbitrarily good technology VR still feels like a niche while it's easy to imagine lots of uses for a lightweight stylish internet-connected HUD that supplies realtime information--even if we're talking years in the future. I tend to believe this is one of the next consumer (and industrial) device categories but a long way to go as a wearable. (We'll presumably see it on a phone first.)
wzdd 4y ago
It's just really weird to me that people are all shocked-Pikachu about Carmack wanting to be the auteur in this scenario and to wield Meta's effectively-infinite resources in the exact ways that he wanted. It's apparent from every interview and article about him that this is how he operates. It seems to have worked well for him in the past, but it was obviously going to be a major culture clash at Meta unless they gave in and let him run the thing.
- cactusplant7374 4y ago
  He was likely to have more success at Meta than his AGI startup. When it comes to intelligence and cognition no one even knows where to begin. The same for studying the brain. And the neural networks in the brain don't resemble anything like the neural networks in current AI. I guess there's this idea that we'll wander into the right territory. That might work for other things but probably not for the most complicated organism on our planet.
  - sinenomine 4y ago
    > When it comes to intelligence and cognition no one even knows where to begin Is it true, though? There is quite nice literature out there, surely John has read these papers during his bootstrap period: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27683554/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27683554/ https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.15556v1 https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.15556v1
    - cactusplant7374 4y ago
      Are those papers breakthroughs in understanding human cognition? It feels like there must be some philosophical underpinning to creating human-like intelligence. I suppose there are two approaches: 1) understand the brain in all its complexity 2) wander upon something that seems like human cognition but isn’t (i.e. GPT) Carmack and everyone else is taking the latter approach. Carmack may end up building something that seems intelligent — if that’s what you mean by intelligence. Consider Chomsky’s view on current AI. He may disagree with me but he certainly disagrees with the idea that actual intelligence or something like AGI will result from current efforts. See the chapter on deep learning in this interview with Chomsky: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cMscNuSUy0I https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cMscNuSUy0I If you type in AI and Chomsky into YT you’ll see many relevant interviews. The web summit one might be the most recent.
peoplefromibiza 4y ago
I've watched many Carmack videos over the years and he never complained about the team not following him or people working for him being not good enough, he always praised the work done and explained in very fine details why the decisions where taken one way or another. When he wanted to remove a pebble from his shoe, he talked extensively of the company decisions, in the higher ups, which is more than fair given his role. He never struck me as a "Steve Jobs of coding" (probably today Elon Musk?). I also had several encounters with John Romero and talked a bit about the times at id Software and he never ever hinted that Carmack was problematic in any way. He's also obviously not a very good politician/sellperson (he can't sell what he hasn't already produced or envisioned) and suffers bureaucracy, like every normal person here that is not a bureaucrat. Anyway. Regardless of the truthfulness of what you write, Carmack has always been able to deliver, both in time and as of code quality and maintainability, one way or another, Meta hasn't. The evidence pile up more against FB/Meta management than against Carmack, moreover I think it's easy to attack the person taking responsibility in person than those hiding in the shadows, Linus suffered the same destiny, but he created Linux and brought it where it is now, the attackers didn't, so maybe Linus was simply right.
- aricz 4y ago
  Check out Lex Fridman and John Carmack interview. Also read Masters of Doom. I think the key with Carmack is that he's a workaholic, and he expects the same from the ones around him.
- sumeno 4y ago
  > He never struck me as a "Steve Jobs of coding" (probably today Elon Musk?). Musk is the Donald Trump of coding if anything.
- joveian 4y ago
  Well, if John Romero vouches for him... rolls eyes https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3nxd3/how-kindness-saved-the-cult-hit-anachronox-from-the-wreck-of-ion-storm https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3nxd3/how-kindness-saved-th...
  - 4y ago
boppo1 4y ago
Not sure I’d trust someone who mixes up ‘their’ and ‘there’ to interpret data proving or disproving some strategy. From the looks of the product, I’d say he was probably right on whatever that stuff was.
- jjtheblunt 4y ago
  it could be auto(in)correct, perhaps via dictation. i'm a language and grammar stickler and rewritten spellings in dictation and just plain autocorrect sometimes sneak by, particularly since iOS started correcting at a delay and several words back. I once wished a girlfriend that her presentation would be "kick ass" but she got a text wishing it to be "lick ass". But it was obviously autocorrect being stubborn.
threatripper 4y ago
This is an interesting comment. In my experience most people were right in their way of thinking. Even if they come to vastly different conclusions, most of the time they are kind-of-right. This continues until objective reality hits as in "can we ship" and "does it make money". And even then it depends on many factors with many people involved. For a vision like VR this is far into the uncertain future and "being right" can mean many different things to people. Data doesn't help much if it is biased, if the analysis is biased or if you just have different definitions and priorities. At the end of the day the real struggle is achieving alignment on business goals and priorities across the whole team. And also aligning them with reality. This is usually where you elect one leader to define those things and the others to follow those definitions.
bsenftner 4y ago
I don't work with John Carmack, but I had a meeting with him once. He is brilliant, no doubt, but he is exactly like every single engineer with no professional communications training. He struggles to make his points in everyday developer language, when he needs to speak more calculated, more measured, and with significantly more audience empathy. Just like 99% of us technologists. We're an industry of weak communicators, and it is hurting all of our careers.
- mach1ne 4y ago
  I think the notion of developers being 'weak communicators' is a bit too simplified. It suggests that if developers were better communicators, then things would move faster & better forward. But the fact is that the audience of non-developers tends to have a completely different mode of thinking, and indeed a different set of targets. Developers would like to see organizations as machines to give instructions to. Non-developers more often see organizations as ladders to climb. It would indeed be a miracle to persuade the latter people into machine-like thinking without a total cultural shift.
  - bsenftner 4y ago
    > It suggests that if developers were better communicators, then things would move faster & better forward. That is exactly what would happen, within developer circles themselves at least. A huge amount of miscommunication and lack of communication routinely takes place within dev teams, and that process knot forming behavior would be eliminated by better communications.
  - gsatic 4y ago
    Good analogy. Ideally ladders are designed based on problem type - simple to complex. But in corporate wonderland, the ladder climbers regularly change that ideal to stay on the ladder. You dont need a miracle. You just need to recognize early, who the most mindlessly ambitious over energetic unimaginative people, in the room are and keep them on leash/direct the energies away from ladder reconfig.
  - s-lambert 4y ago
richliss 4y ago
I worked with someone who was a bona fide development genius about 10 years ago and he was a CTO and co-founder at the time and considered himself to be able to input into any conversation with people who were domain experts in fields that he wasn't. I remember him overruling the Head of Design and enforcing Arial to be the typeface used for the corporate brand because it was the typeface was present on more computers than any other in the world. Suffice to say the original typeface was much better. Self doubt is a really really important trait to have as a leader - don't automatically assume you're right outside of your area of expertise and that team members can come up with good solutions that aren't yours is the only way you can ever really scale. The CTO ultimately was forced out and became a specialist consultant and that probably suited him.
- michpoch 4y ago
  Ok, that is an example where his advice was apparently incorrect. Was that a rule though? If you give advice in 100 different meetings, you'll be wrong in some of them for sure, even if you're a domain expert. If he was the CTO and co-founder it seems that his approach worked well, at least to get him and the company to that level.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  What’s wrong with Arial? I mean I know it is disliked by typography fans because it is a ripoff of the popular Helvetica. But like, moral concerns aside or whatever, as a slightly worse ripoff of a good and popular typeface, it is unsurprisingly fairly visually appealing… It seems like a reasonable product decision given that most people don’t care about typeface history.
  - bb88 4y ago
    I find Arial slightly discomforting, because the kerning is not as nice as with Helvetica. Helvetica feels "denser". But more to the point, for a corporate logo, Arial feels like a cheap knock off to the more polished Helvetica. You can see this yourself, by looking at corporate existing corporate logos designed in helvetica and then redesigned in Arial. https://www.ironicsans.com/helvarialquiz/ https://www.ironicsans.com/helvarialquiz/ Admittedly this is personal preference in the end, but I feel like if HR is going to give someone bad news, they're going to do it in Arial. If Apple is going to release a life changing technology, they're going to do it in Helvetica.
heather45879 4y ago
Honestly no one really cares about VR that’s the problem. It’s cool in concept but whose going to shell out cash to be tethered to a machine wearing goggles sitting in a chair? AR has potential but even that is marginally better than alternative solutions. Also, I don’t know about y’all but I don’t trust Facebook so I don’t trust Meta. They are a data-leach. We still probably have a decade or more to go with this technology it has to be affordable, lightweight, AR glasses not tied to a company that sells peoples data!
- ghosty141 4y ago
  VR shines in simulators, flighing, driving etc, there the immersion is key but thats really the only domain in private life where VR really works. In corporate there are bunch of neat areas but AR is defintely more useful right now. E.g. support, meetings, teaching
  - andybak 4y ago
    > AR is defintely more useful right now. VR and AR have essentially merged at this point. Nobody is releasing VR headsets without passthrough (and non-passthrough VR still isn't viable tech yet. cost, brightness and poor FOV are holding it back). So every VR headset is also an AR headset.
    - oakashes 4y ago
      Passthrough AR inherently has the same FoV as VR so I'm having trouble interpreting your comment. I also don't see how brightness would be an issue for non-passthrough VR. Did you mean "non-passthrough AR", like the HoloLens?
      - andybak 4y ago
        Sorry, yes. Non-passthrough AR.
- JohnBooty 4y ago
  Honestly no one really cares about VR that’s the problem. I feel like this is definitely the elephant in the room everybody is ignoring. Almost nobody gives a hoot about VR! I'm a software engineer with a lot of (surprise, surprise) nerdy/geeky/whatever friends and interest in VR is close to zero. A few friends vouched for various games like Half-Life:Alyx and Beat Saber, but nobody was claiming it was a life altering experience and nobody is clamoring to live more of their lives in VR. VR definitely makes a great game controller for some kinds of games and there are even a few killer apps, but I mean like... Wii Sports was a "killer app" for motion controls and that doesn't mean it was a technology that shaped our lives in the long run. And needless to say non-technical folks have less than zero interest in strapping a computer to their head and face. God bless John Carmack, but it feels like he and FB are arguing about execution issues on a product nobody cared about in the first place.
fxtentacle 4y ago
I know someone who built a solid business around using the Oculus Go to show off kitchen designs to prospective buyers. The fact that the Go was a cheap-ish stand-alone Android device was really valuable for them.
- throwaway2037 4y ago
  Can you share the business name? That sounds very interesting.
camillomiller 4y ago
Oh, VR is currently successful? Must have missed some sales reports then…
aswanson 4y ago
Yep. There are lots of talented people, programming wise, who can't communicate vision, lead, or inspire teams. These are mostly orthogonal to technical skill, but are extremely important if you're building something that requires more than one person.
NAHWheatCracker 4y ago
Damn this sounds similar to a project manager I'm working with, except he doesn't have any of the technical/engineering merit.
- cudgy 4y ago
  Are project managers expected to have technical/engineering merit? Or are they expected to be experts in managing complex projects at a high level?
  - NAHWheatCracker 4y ago
    I don't think they are expected to have technical merit, but Carmack at least has that going for him.
osigurdson 4y ago
Interesting perspective. One ominous anecdote is I've noticed that kids seem to have lost interest in the Oculus / VR. I'm assuming the business model needs to be bootstrapped with games and then move into other areas. I hope it is successful however, the world will be kind of boring if all we ever have is screens.
tiffanyh 4y ago
Sounds like Steve Jobs. Someone who is visionary, accustom to being in charge, and uses their intuition/gut as their compass because they fully understand the buck stops with them.
civilized 4y ago
You could be right about all of this, but it isn't very compelling without more concrete detail. From the perspective of a neutral observer, what we're getting here is one anonymous person's interpretation of Carmack's behavior, and we don't know anything about this person. So for all we know, it's equally possible that this person is arrogant and narcissistic and takes disagreement as bullying. Not saying I actually believe this of you, but there are plenty of such people in the tech industry. So I don't know what to think here.
ThinkBeat 4y ago
Everyone fails. Carmack has also had a lot of wins. His accomplishments stand on their own. Perhaps he is not a good people person. He puts in an astonishing amount of effort on his pursuits or at least he used to. He may expect the same of others, not understanding that the majority of people have different lives and goals. He might also just be an asshole. It will be interesting to see what he does next. I think he still has one or two wins left in him.
d0100 4y ago
there
lyu07282 4y ago
I feel like this post would have more credibility if the Quest and Horizons wasn't such a technical and privacy disaster.
up2isomorphism 4y ago
Well, from what I have experienced, the people who dare to say “I don’t care” in a corporate settings are usually much trust worthy than those been polite. Also most of time he said that because of the sheet frustration from the enormous BS that surround him.
deleted 4y ago
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HandstandMick 4y ago
It takes two. If accurate and true, there is an obvious conflict between the two of you. John perhaps didn't listen to your point of view enough and in the reverse you didn't respect his view and role in the company. His success was your success and it would seem you both failed as a result of the conflict. Tech is full of difficult personality and ego. It's multicultural and communication challenges and cultural differences are common are often misinterpreted. At the end of the day though, many of us just want compassion and respect in our roles, to be valued and heard. All said, feel in this described circumstance that perhaps the initial folly was all indeed John's. He held the power after all to make the right start.
methods21 4y ago
Carmack has more than proved himself. ! Guess what buddy.... the entire fing executive management team is wading into areas they don't know this about, stabbing each other in the back, slowing progress due to corporate BS. And so what if Carmack was 'wading into areas where he had no experience'? (What was he showing up at the quarterly internal financial review and advising on advance tax strategy with offshore account to line exec pockets???? ; When you have a talent like that the organization makes space for them. It was never a cultural fit from the start.
phkahler 4y ago
>> When data proved his idea was wrong, he would say words to the effect of "I don't care, because I still believe I'm right from an ideological background". He would devalue people, there expertise, there experience, and there thoughts because "I'm John Carmack" Projecting are you? You're devaluing someone with way more experience and accomplishment than you. Did it ever occur to you that he was right? I've read a lot of his posts that cover ideology, and I always agree. Ideology is what it takes to go big and play a long game. If the short term stuff does fail (even his) it is appropriate to fall back to ideology to figure out what to do next. I also never saw anything revolutionary in his work. He's really good at selecting practical and straight forward approaches to real problems. If he says "that's stupid and here's why", it's worth listening to even if you can make it work.
wyclif 4y ago
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but I have trouble believing that someone in your position would mistake "above" for "among" and not know the difference between "their" and "there." Surely a company like Meta has higher standards for written English.
pengaru 4y ago
> When I hear people say "If only Meta would let Carmack do what he wants we'd see his ideal VR experience and it would be amazing". You already saw it. It was Oculus Go, and by every metric is was a commercial, financial, and technical, disaster. Hasn't Carmack always been pretty clear about wanting Meta to deliver an ultra-low-cost high-volume headset prioritizing getting them in as many hands as possible? Did Oculus Go deliver this? Because Carmack has seemed to be constantly complaining about this with every germane talk he's given to date...
nopenopenopeno 4y ago
It would be slightly easier to take you seriously if you could spell correctly.
- dang 4y ago
  You can't attack others like this here. Since you've been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly in other contexts as well, I've banned this account. Please don't create accounts to do this with. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
cleak 4y ago
FWIW, my interactions with Carmack have shown him to be extremely pragmatic when it comes to tech. Going quickly from “we absolutely shouldn’t do that” to “ok it makes sense in that context”.
throwaway0asd 4y ago
> When data proved his idea was wrong, he would say words to the effect of "I don't care, because I still believe I'm right from an ideological background". I cannot imagine commercial software in any form where that is not the prevailing sentiment. I have heard of developers who actually measure things in the capacity of their corporate employment but in 20 years of doing this work I have only seen it once. As such I don’t even bother mentioning performance or correctness at work (across all my employers) where evidence is so hastily discarded and inconvenient conclusions are a suicide pill.
yownie 4y ago
> there expertise, there experience, and there thoughts because their* I do not believe you worked where you say solely from this.
Apofis 4y ago
People with attitudes like yours are why Zuckerberg _WILL_ fail in his vision. If Meta VR cannot be more compelling than video games, it is and will continue to be Dead on Arrival. Good luck though, with your feelings and whatnot. The "avatars" that Mark was forced to present are frankly embarrassing and humiliating in this day and age. 5% GPU utilization is a joke. Mark's gotta give all of you the boot. I'm happy for John that he got to escape that sycophantian paradise.
- arolihas 4y ago
  5% gpu utilization was just an analogy carmack used, he clarified in an edit to the post.
  - Apofis 4y ago
    I understand this year they presented much more believable avatars, but yeah presenting Second Life as a next gen experience must have been frustrating for John.
deleted 4y ago
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AYBABTME 4y ago
His critique resonates with my expectations from large enterprises, and your perception also resonates from what I expect of large enterprises workers. So I'm guessing he's probably not wrong and your experience was probably an example of him hitting social/political roadblocks. In my arguably limited human sized experience, the vast majority of people at Meta-sized companies prefer the safety and comfort of things going slowly and being discussed at length, and being careful to respect all the hoops that need jumping through. And not having their caged shaken too much. This leads to 5% GPU utilization.
- DonHopkins 4y ago
  Do you mean Meta-sized or Meta-stasized? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi
slim 4y ago
By reading between the lines of your story and carmack's, my guess is carmack was against facebook user profiling in VR headsets, and you think the sales numbers are sufficient and prove him wrong. If that's the case I'm with Carmack both because "the ideological background" and because the sales argument does not hold : you don't know what the sales would have been (and will be in the future) if facebook did not strong arm users into surrendering their privacy
- codemac 4y ago
  This.. this is not true at all. The comments on his internal post elucidate where the conflict is, but it's a larger strategic choice about where Meta should be investing. It is more about his comments here: https://venturebeat.com/mobile/oculus-cto-carmack-downplays-consumer-ar-calls-magic-leap-overhyped/ https://venturebeat.com/mobile/oculus-cto-carmack-downplays-...
enqk 4y ago
What comes to mind is how hard it is to get low-latency user experiences out of a comglometate of teams exchanging data via blocks. I would expect someone like Carmack to have to interact with such teams in ways that they’ll find intrusive
grumbel 4y ago
> It was Oculus Go, and by every metric is was a commercial, financial, and technical, disaster. It was the second best selling VR headset at that time, only behind PSVR1. The only problem with it was that it came too late. GearVR had been around since 2015 already, Go was essentially just a standalone version of that, but it took until 2018 to release. That was simply to late, as a year later it was replaced by the Quest1 and 3DOF VR was killed. Another problem with the Go was that Facebook didn't put effort into good 3DOF content. They never released a VR180-3D camera. Never build their own VR video platform. And finally they made Quest2 deliberately incompatible with Go, despite Quest1 still having some compatibility. There was and still is a lot of unnecessary fracturing going on in the VR space, even among Meta's own headsets. I think the Go line should simple have been continued with a stronger focus on movie instead of gaming. The Nreal Air shows what is possible when going that direction and Meta with an 8 year head start should have an easy time matching that. Instead we only got Quest2, which is much more heavy and low resolution than it needs to be for a movie headset.
edem 4y ago
Given the fact that this is a throwaway account your credibility on this matter is less then zero. In fact this sounds like as if your project was shut down by Carmack and now your ego is bruised.
Patrol8394 4y ago
Steve Jobs once said: “ It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to to , We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”
knighthack 4y ago
I'm gonna dismiss this whole story, since it's anonymous, while the person you're criticizing (Carmack) isn't. First, we have no idea what "evidence" or "data" you allege that disproved Carmack, or how Carmack insisted on being right "from an ideological background" (whether that even happened at all). Second, Carmack is one of the most data-driven and performance-oriented programmers you can find, and is quick to admit errors where he is wrong; to suggest that he is ideology-first (which, from his Twitter and public statements, has never been the case) over truth in tech matters - is bonkers-insane. And it's such an easy thing to call out someone you dislike as "toxic", just because you disagree with them. Your statement also makes no sense: the phrase 'politely toxic' is an oxymoron - as when one 'politely disagrees', it suggests reasonable disagreement, not outright difficultness. Further, "good, and in some cases legally required, work" can be work that have nothing to do with the end goals - it could even be baseline administrative work.

felipellrocha 4y ago

If i had nickel for every time i had been in a conversation where someone “proved they were right” even though they were nowhere near there, ok, i wouldn’t have millions but I’d have somewhere in the $50s which is a lot higher than you’d expect

petee 4y ago

Is VR really successful? Because it seems like its been floundering for years, and still hasn't learned to walk yet. And your example in a way backs up what Carmack is saying -- nobody listened, and Oculus sucks, as you pointed out.

nullc 4y ago

> and in some cases legally required, work Are we talking EMI compliance or surveillance backdoors? :)

mkrecny 4y ago

creativenolo 4y ago

Thanks for sharing this point of view and voice from inside Meta.

heavenlyblue 4y ago

loco5niner 4y ago

I definitely saw a lot of that in him when I read "Masters of Doom".

eyko 4y ago

earthnail 4y ago
Big corps usually prohibit their employees from expressing their personal opinions. It’s sometimes tolerated but always against the employment contract. So whenever you’re saying something, bigcorp could decide that “this one’s too far”. On a topic with as much PR as this one, it’s rather dangerous to comment on if you gave a medium-to-high level position. The reason big corps do it is so that their PR department has ANY chance of sending a coherent message. So it’s not even evil behaviour IMHO. All that to say, I understand why they used an anonymous account. Of course, that doesn’t mean one has to believe them, it’s their word against Carmack’s. But it’s good to hear that perspective IMO.
- vintermann 4y ago
  > Big corps usually prohibit their employees from expressing their personal opinions. Yes, but does that make it any better though? We understand why they have to do it anonymously, but it's still someone with nothing at stake, who we can't evaluate the claims of.
  - dvzk 4y ago
    I'm not sure there is much of substance to evaluate. If we fired every technical lead who sometimes "waded into areas with no experience," issued orders, followed a conviction or two and occasionally provided disparaging feedback, there would be no good engineers left. The bullying and devaluing claims are worth investigation, but that's always very subjective and range from "my boss disagrees with me" to horrific abuse.
- johnnyanmac 4y ago
  I don't disagree, and I was in a similar position not too long ago. But it also doesn't change the fact that this is ultimately hearsay. Maybe this was someone who butted heads and ultimately had the better idea go by the wayside because they lacked clout. Maybe they are a gilted employee whose full story would make them feel like how they described Carmack. We don't know and on the internet it's way too easy to pretend to that sabetour who never even worked at Meta but is very angry about some design decision in Quake 3. There's ultimately no good way to do PR as a non-PR employee for that reason, even if the big corp allowed it. You either put your name on the line or you just say nothing. Most employees choose the latter. Your best bet if you have any real evidence and want impact is to seek a journalist for coverage and anonymity. Anything else is simply a footnote to keep in mind until (if ever) some big bust happened.

jimmySixDOF 4y ago

He was alone on his side of the table for the All In One integrated hardware approach that was the Go and became the Quest and, after years, proved to be the right long term direction. Of course that is out of his mouth according to him but, if true, it is the kind of high level strategy setting that separates market leaders from the also ran's. Very different from task level involvement but friction there should be separate from effectiveness at the CTO's desk level (& I have to guess Boz is the one who's quality of life got improved more than specific engineering teams)

kubb 4y ago

HN is all about that cult of personality, we want to believe in heroic programmers (or founders) who singlehandedly change the world with their geinus clarity. Paul Graham said this, John Carmack said that and we lap it all up. It's been this way since the ancient times, and the stories of Hercules and Theseus. We mythologize these personalities, and in our mind they become demigods. But there's a reason the folk wisdom tells you to never meet your heroes. When you do, you painfully realize that the stories didn't focus on their humanity but instead were spinning the myths of their divinity. The person in your head is a source of inspiration. The person in the world, on which the former is based, is a source of disappointment.

HellDunkel 4y ago
Well said but we don’t know for sure if the above is true. Carmack is a genious programmer and rather than trash him right away we should acknowledge that his job was hard- very hard. In any biography the failures are way more interesting than the successes. The ancient greek understood that pretty well.
johnnyanmac 4y ago
Carmack aside, I think the "never meet your heroes" thing is even simpler: no one's perfect. Your hero could have cured cancer but maybe they're a nervous wreck in public. Or aren't native to your area and may commuicate badly face to face for culture clashing reasons. Or maybe they are great in a small intimate team but completely fall apart in a large setting. Heck it could be as simple as finding out they are a heavy smoker or an alcoholic. The common stereotype is "heroes are narcissitic and have skeletons in the closet", but there are valid reasons for an otherwise good person to fail in what may be common sense to others.
- sundvor 4y ago
  To me it would be the opposite; we all have our faults, so how do they manage the feats that they do? There's no point idolizing people for their accomplishments in the "they must be perfect" kind of way. Ie I look at John and see someone amazingly fit for their age (very close to mine - only a few years older, yet he appears younger); I'd like to learn more about his routines (running and judo?) to see how I might benefit from the same.

trevyn 4y ago

Why was the Oculus Go considered a failure?

fsiefken 4y ago
I think he meant commercially, technically (ideologically?) for me it was an amazing iphone/ipad like innovation - integrating samsung gear in one standalone easy to use package. I'd still use it for certain apps. https://www.reddit.com/r/OculusGo/comments/rnphlq/was_the_oculus_go_was_made_for_failure/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OculusGo/comments/rnphlq/was_the_oc... Oculus Go formed one of the starting points for 6DOF mobile VR (even though the Quest1 'Santa Cruz' was already in development). If the comment was truthful, here it shows some bias. There are always multiple sides to a story.

iforgotpassword 4y ago

Yeah well, you're anonymous, so you might as well be someone with a huge ego who got their idea shut down by Carmack once and is still bitter about it. More often than not, when people think they "prove something wrong with data" it's more that they're "taking some data and interpret in a way that fits their standpoint". Carmack has proven enough times in the past that he's able to deliver, that he can push technology, knows what's possible and what isn't, and can wrap up a product. "Wading into fields he has no experience in" sounds pretty unlikely for VR given his past work. And I wouldn't consider the Oculus Go a failure, more like ahead of it's time and released too early. A prototype of the quest. But I guess now it's easy to claim everything that's bad about the go was Carmack's work and everything good about the quest and quest 2 was someone else's.

salawat 4y ago
>Carmack has proven enough times in the past that he's able to deliver, that he can push technology, knows what's possible and what isn't, and can wrap up a product. In the finance world, lesson number 1 is past performance is not a predictor of future results. I don't care how much of a virtuoso you are, if you clash with culture, you're fucked. I'm just coming out of a similar stint where the best I could do was hold off a predilection toward toxic culture norms long enough for processes to materialize. To support the business in spite of it. So I know exactly the kind of forces he was probably working against. It's rather thankless, draining, and exhausting in a way sleep doesn't help with. It's often bidirectional as well, so there's a trick to figuring out when it's time to bounce.
P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
This was my interpretation as well.
BlargMcLarg 4y ago
>has proven enough times in the past Past experiences do not mean future success. This isn't even about Carmack: past 'heroes' end up failing in their decision-making in the future many times, and they were followed for no other reason than 'they have a track record'. The sooner that myth dies, the better.

CynicusRex 4y ago

ben_w 4y ago
We're you trying to use a throwaway account for that? Because I think you used your main.
- thetoon 4y ago
  Weren't he rather addressing the "throwaway" user's comment?

Mistletoe 4y ago

Maybe Oculus Go was a failure in all those areas because VR will always be a failure in those areas.

danuker 4y ago
Indeed. I couldn't believe Facebook bet so much on VR, and especially a low-quality 3D MMORPG full of micropayments. With no LEGS. How long have video game characters had legs?? I feel dizzy even playing Minecraft on a plain screen. I won't ever buy VR goggles. Let alone ones bound to a Facebook account.
- cloverich 4y ago
  I've heard they bet on VR for the same reason Microsoft bet on a mobile phone -- they want to own a device ecosystem. It makes a lot more sense to me in that context.
- eddiewithzato 4y ago
  Zuck must’ve been high when OKing VR, I still think Google Glass is the way forward with augmented reality. Very comfortable and isn’t trying to rewrite how humans communicate. I have VR and it is immersive, but way too uncomfortable.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - annadane 4y ago
    He's not high, he's been treating people like contempt ever since Harvard, this isn't new
  - ghaff 4y ago
    If you imagine arbitrarily good technology VR still feels like a niche while it's easy to imagine lots of uses for a lightweight stylish internet-connected HUD that supplies realtime information--even if we're talking years in the future. I tend to believe this is one of the next consumer (and industrial) device categories but a long way to go as a wearable. (We'll presumably see it on a phone first.)

wzdd 4y ago

It's just really weird to me that people are all shocked-Pikachu about Carmack wanting to be the auteur in this scenario and to wield Meta's effectively-infinite resources in the exact ways that he wanted. It's apparent from every interview and article about him that this is how he operates. It seems to have worked well for him in the past, but it was obviously going to be a major culture clash at Meta unless they gave in and let him run the thing.

cactusplant7374 4y ago
He was likely to have more success at Meta than his AGI startup. When it comes to intelligence and cognition no one even knows where to begin. The same for studying the brain. And the neural networks in the brain don't resemble anything like the neural networks in current AI. I guess there's this idea that we'll wander into the right territory. That might work for other things but probably not for the most complicated organism on our planet.
- sinenomine 4y ago
  > When it comes to intelligence and cognition no one even knows where to begin Is it true, though? There is quite nice literature out there, surely John has read these papers during his bootstrap period: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27683554/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27683554/ https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.15556v1 https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.15556v1
  - cactusplant7374 4y ago
    Are those papers breakthroughs in understanding human cognition? It feels like there must be some philosophical underpinning to creating human-like intelligence. I suppose there are two approaches: 1) understand the brain in all its complexity 2) wander upon something that seems like human cognition but isn’t (i.e. GPT) Carmack and everyone else is taking the latter approach. Carmack may end up building something that seems intelligent — if that’s what you mean by intelligence. Consider Chomsky’s view on current AI. He may disagree with me but he certainly disagrees with the idea that actual intelligence or something like AGI will result from current efforts. See the chapter on deep learning in this interview with Chomsky: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cMscNuSUy0I https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cMscNuSUy0I If you type in AI and Chomsky into YT you’ll see many relevant interviews. The web summit one might be the most recent.

peoplefromibiza 4y ago

I've watched many Carmack videos over the years and he never complained about the team not following him or people working for him being not good enough, he always praised the work done and explained in very fine details why the decisions where taken one way or another. When he wanted to remove a pebble from his shoe, he talked extensively of the company decisions, in the higher ups, which is more than fair given his role. He never struck me as a "Steve Jobs of coding" (probably today Elon Musk?). I also had several encounters with John Romero and talked a bit about the times at id Software and he never ever hinted that Carmack was problematic in any way. He's also obviously not a very good politician/sellperson (he can't sell what he hasn't already produced or envisioned) and suffers bureaucracy, like every normal person here that is not a bureaucrat. Anyway. Regardless of the truthfulness of what you write, Carmack has always been able to deliver, both in time and as of code quality and maintainability, one way or another, Meta hasn't. The evidence pile up more against FB/Meta management than against Carmack, moreover I think it's easy to attack the person taking responsibility in person than those hiding in the shadows, Linus suffered the same destiny, but he created Linux and brought it where it is now, the attackers didn't, so maybe Linus was simply right.

aricz 4y ago
Check out Lex Fridman and John Carmack interview. Also read Masters of Doom. I think the key with Carmack is that he's a workaholic, and he expects the same from the ones around him.
sumeno 4y ago
> He never struck me as a "Steve Jobs of coding" (probably today Elon Musk?). Musk is the Donald Trump of coding if anything.
joveian 4y ago
Well, if John Romero vouches for him... rolls eyes https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3nxd3/how-kindness-saved-the-cult-hit-anachronox-from-the-wreck-of-ion-storm https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3nxd3/how-kindness-saved-th...
- 4y ago

boppo1 4y ago

Not sure I’d trust someone who mixes up ‘their’ and ‘there’ to interpret data proving or disproving some strategy. From the looks of the product, I’d say he was probably right on whatever that stuff was.

jjtheblunt 4y ago
it could be auto(in)correct, perhaps via dictation. i'm a language and grammar stickler and rewritten spellings in dictation and just plain autocorrect sometimes sneak by, particularly since iOS started correcting at a delay and several words back. I once wished a girlfriend that her presentation would be "kick ass" but she got a text wishing it to be "lick ass". But it was obviously autocorrect being stubborn.

threatripper 4y ago

This is an interesting comment. In my experience most people were right in their way of thinking. Even if they come to vastly different conclusions, most of the time they are kind-of-right. This continues until objective reality hits as in "can we ship" and "does it make money". And even then it depends on many factors with many people involved. For a vision like VR this is far into the uncertain future and "being right" can mean many different things to people. Data doesn't help much if it is biased, if the analysis is biased or if you just have different definitions and priorities. At the end of the day the real struggle is achieving alignment on business goals and priorities across the whole team. And also aligning them with reality. This is usually where you elect one leader to define those things and the others to follow those definitions.

bsenftner 4y ago

I don't work with John Carmack, but I had a meeting with him once. He is brilliant, no doubt, but he is exactly like every single engineer with no professional communications training. He struggles to make his points in everyday developer language, when he needs to speak more calculated, more measured, and with significantly more audience empathy. Just like 99% of us technologists. We're an industry of weak communicators, and it is hurting all of our careers.

mach1ne 4y ago
I think the notion of developers being 'weak communicators' is a bit too simplified. It suggests that if developers were better communicators, then things would move faster & better forward. But the fact is that the audience of non-developers tends to have a completely different mode of thinking, and indeed a different set of targets. Developers would like to see organizations as machines to give instructions to. Non-developers more often see organizations as ladders to climb. It would indeed be a miracle to persuade the latter people into machine-like thinking without a total cultural shift.
- bsenftner 4y ago
  > It suggests that if developers were better communicators, then things would move faster & better forward. That is exactly what would happen, within developer circles themselves at least. A huge amount of miscommunication and lack of communication routinely takes place within dev teams, and that process knot forming behavior would be eliminated by better communications.
- gsatic 4y ago
  Good analogy. Ideally ladders are designed based on problem type - simple to complex. But in corporate wonderland, the ladder climbers regularly change that ideal to stay on the ladder. You dont need a miracle. You just need to recognize early, who the most mindlessly ambitious over energetic unimaginative people, in the room are and keep them on leash/direct the energies away from ladder reconfig.
- s-lambert 4y ago

richliss 4y ago

I worked with someone who was a bona fide development genius about 10 years ago and he was a CTO and co-founder at the time and considered himself to be able to input into any conversation with people who were domain experts in fields that he wasn't. I remember him overruling the Head of Design and enforcing Arial to be the typeface used for the corporate brand because it was the typeface was present on more computers than any other in the world. Suffice to say the original typeface was much better. Self doubt is a really really important trait to have as a leader - don't automatically assume you're right outside of your area of expertise and that team members can come up with good solutions that aren't yours is the only way you can ever really scale. The CTO ultimately was forced out and became a specialist consultant and that probably suited him.

michpoch 4y ago
Ok, that is an example where his advice was apparently incorrect. Was that a rule though? If you give advice in 100 different meetings, you'll be wrong in some of them for sure, even if you're a domain expert. If he was the CTO and co-founder it seems that his approach worked well, at least to get him and the company to that level.
bee_rider 4y ago
What’s wrong with Arial? I mean I know it is disliked by typography fans because it is a ripoff of the popular Helvetica. But like, moral concerns aside or whatever, as a slightly worse ripoff of a good and popular typeface, it is unsurprisingly fairly visually appealing… It seems like a reasonable product decision given that most people don’t care about typeface history.
- bb88 4y ago
  I find Arial slightly discomforting, because the kerning is not as nice as with Helvetica. Helvetica feels "denser". But more to the point, for a corporate logo, Arial feels like a cheap knock off to the more polished Helvetica. You can see this yourself, by looking at corporate existing corporate logos designed in helvetica and then redesigned in Arial. https://www.ironicsans.com/helvarialquiz/ https://www.ironicsans.com/helvarialquiz/ Admittedly this is personal preference in the end, but I feel like if HR is going to give someone bad news, they're going to do it in Arial. If Apple is going to release a life changing technology, they're going to do it in Helvetica.

heather45879 4y ago

Honestly no one really cares about VR that’s the problem. It’s cool in concept but whose going to shell out cash to be tethered to a machine wearing goggles sitting in a chair? AR has potential but even that is marginally better than alternative solutions. Also, I don’t know about y’all but I don’t trust Facebook so I don’t trust Meta. They are a data-leach. We still probably have a decade or more to go with this technology it has to be affordable, lightweight, AR glasses not tied to a company that sells peoples data!

ghosty141 4y ago
VR shines in simulators, flighing, driving etc, there the immersion is key but thats really the only domain in private life where VR really works. In corporate there are bunch of neat areas but AR is defintely more useful right now. E.g. support, meetings, teaching
- andybak 4y ago
  > AR is defintely more useful right now. VR and AR have essentially merged at this point. Nobody is releasing VR headsets without passthrough (and non-passthrough VR still isn't viable tech yet. cost, brightness and poor FOV are holding it back). So every VR headset is also an AR headset.
  - oakashes 4y ago
    Passthrough AR inherently has the same FoV as VR so I'm having trouble interpreting your comment. I also don't see how brightness would be an issue for non-passthrough VR. Did you mean "non-passthrough AR", like the HoloLens?
    - andybak 4y ago
      Sorry, yes. Non-passthrough AR.
JohnBooty 4y ago
Honestly no one really cares about VR that’s the problem. I feel like this is definitely the elephant in the room everybody is ignoring. Almost nobody gives a hoot about VR! I'm a software engineer with a lot of (surprise, surprise) nerdy/geeky/whatever friends and interest in VR is close to zero. A few friends vouched for various games like Half-Life:Alyx and Beat Saber, but nobody was claiming it was a life altering experience and nobody is clamoring to live more of their lives in VR. VR definitely makes a great game controller for some kinds of games and there are even a few killer apps, but I mean like... Wii Sports was a "killer app" for motion controls and that doesn't mean it was a technology that shaped our lives in the long run. And needless to say non-technical folks have less than zero interest in strapping a computer to their head and face. God bless John Carmack, but it feels like he and FB are arguing about execution issues on a product nobody cared about in the first place.

fxtentacle 4y ago

I know someone who built a solid business around using the Oculus Go to show off kitchen designs to prospective buyers. The fact that the Go was a cheap-ish stand-alone Android device was really valuable for them.

throwaway2037 4y ago
Can you share the business name? That sounds very interesting.

camillomiller 4y ago

Oh, VR is currently successful? Must have missed some sales reports then…

aswanson 4y ago

Yep. There are lots of talented people, programming wise, who can't communicate vision, lead, or inspire teams. These are mostly orthogonal to technical skill, but are extremely important if you're building something that requires more than one person.

NAHWheatCracker 4y ago

Damn this sounds similar to a project manager I'm working with, except he doesn't have any of the technical/engineering merit.

cudgy 4y ago
Are project managers expected to have technical/engineering merit? Or are they expected to be experts in managing complex projects at a high level?
- NAHWheatCracker 4y ago
  I don't think they are expected to have technical merit, but Carmack at least has that going for him.

osigurdson 4y ago

Interesting perspective. One ominous anecdote is I've noticed that kids seem to have lost interest in the Oculus / VR. I'm assuming the business model needs to be bootstrapped with games and then move into other areas. I hope it is successful however, the world will be kind of boring if all we ever have is screens.

tiffanyh 4y ago

Sounds like Steve Jobs. Someone who is visionary, accustom to being in charge, and uses their intuition/gut as their compass because they fully understand the buck stops with them.

civilized 4y ago

You could be right about all of this, but it isn't very compelling without more concrete detail. From the perspective of a neutral observer, what we're getting here is one anonymous person's interpretation of Carmack's behavior, and we don't know anything about this person. So for all we know, it's equally possible that this person is arrogant and narcissistic and takes disagreement as bullying. Not saying I actually believe this of you, but there are plenty of such people in the tech industry. So I don't know what to think here.

ThinkBeat 4y ago

Everyone fails. Carmack has also had a lot of wins. His accomplishments stand on their own. Perhaps he is not a good people person. He puts in an astonishing amount of effort on his pursuits or at least he used to. He may expect the same of others, not understanding that the majority of people have different lives and goals. He might also just be an asshole. It will be interesting to see what he does next. I think he still has one or two wins left in him.

d0100 4y ago

there

lyu07282 4y ago

I feel like this post would have more credibility if the Quest and Horizons wasn't such a technical and privacy disaster.

up2isomorphism 4y ago

Well, from what I have experienced, the people who dare to say “I don’t care” in a corporate settings are usually much trust worthy than those been polite. Also most of time he said that because of the sheet frustration from the enormous BS that surround him.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

HandstandMick 4y ago

It takes two. If accurate and true, there is an obvious conflict between the two of you. John perhaps didn't listen to your point of view enough and in the reverse you didn't respect his view and role in the company. His success was your success and it would seem you both failed as a result of the conflict. Tech is full of difficult personality and ego. It's multicultural and communication challenges and cultural differences are common are often misinterpreted. At the end of the day though, many of us just want compassion and respect in our roles, to be valued and heard. All said, feel in this described circumstance that perhaps the initial folly was all indeed John's. He held the power after all to make the right start.

methods21 4y ago

Carmack has more than proved himself. ! Guess what buddy.... the entire fing executive management team is wading into areas they don't know this about, stabbing each other in the back, slowing progress due to corporate BS. And so what if Carmack was 'wading into areas where he had no experience'? (What was he showing up at the quarterly internal financial review and advising on advance tax strategy with offshore account to line exec pockets???? ; When you have a talent like that the organization makes space for them. It was never a cultural fit from the start.

phkahler 4y ago

>> When data proved his idea was wrong, he would say words to the effect of "I don't care, because I still believe I'm right from an ideological background". He would devalue people, there expertise, there experience, and there thoughts because "I'm John Carmack" Projecting are you? You're devaluing someone with way more experience and accomplishment than you. Did it ever occur to you that he was right? I've read a lot of his posts that cover ideology, and I always agree. Ideology is what it takes to go big and play a long game. If the short term stuff does fail (even his) it is appropriate to fall back to ideology to figure out what to do next. I also never saw anything revolutionary in his work. He's really good at selecting practical and straight forward approaches to real problems. If he says "that's stupid and here's why", it's worth listening to even if you can make it work.

wyclif 4y ago

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but I have trouble believing that someone in your position would mistake "above" for "among" and not know the difference between "their" and "there." Surely a company like Meta has higher standards for written English.

pengaru 4y ago

> When I hear people say "If only Meta would let Carmack do what he wants we'd see his ideal VR experience and it would be amazing". You already saw it. It was Oculus Go, and by every metric is was a commercial, financial, and technical, disaster. Hasn't Carmack always been pretty clear about wanting Meta to deliver an ultra-low-cost high-volume headset prioritizing getting them in as many hands as possible? Did Oculus Go deliver this? Because Carmack has seemed to be constantly complaining about this with every germane talk he's given to date...

nopenopenopeno 4y ago

It would be slightly easier to take you seriously if you could spell correctly.

dang 4y ago
You can't attack others like this here. Since you've been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly in other contexts as well, I've banned this account. Please don't create accounts to do this with. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

cleak 4y ago

FWIW, my interactions with Carmack have shown him to be extremely pragmatic when it comes to tech. Going quickly from “we absolutely shouldn’t do that” to “ok it makes sense in that context”.

throwaway0asd 4y ago

> When data proved his idea was wrong, he would say words to the effect of "I don't care, because I still believe I'm right from an ideological background". I cannot imagine commercial software in any form where that is not the prevailing sentiment. I have heard of developers who actually measure things in the capacity of their corporate employment but in 20 years of doing this work I have only seen it once. As such I don’t even bother mentioning performance or correctness at work (across all my employers) where evidence is so hastily discarded and inconvenient conclusions are a suicide pill.

yownie 4y ago

> there expertise, there experience, and there thoughts because their* I do not believe you worked where you say solely from this.

Apofis 4y ago

People with attitudes like yours are why Zuckerberg _WILL_ fail in his vision. If Meta VR cannot be more compelling than video games, it is and will continue to be Dead on Arrival. Good luck though, with your feelings and whatnot. The "avatars" that Mark was forced to present are frankly embarrassing and humiliating in this day and age. 5% GPU utilization is a joke. Mark's gotta give all of you the boot. I'm happy for John that he got to escape that sycophantian paradise.

arolihas 4y ago
5% gpu utilization was just an analogy carmack used, he clarified in an edit to the post.
- Apofis 4y ago
  I understand this year they presented much more believable avatars, but yeah presenting Second Life as a next gen experience must have been frustrating for John.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

AYBABTME 4y ago

His critique resonates with my expectations from large enterprises, and your perception also resonates from what I expect of large enterprises workers. So I'm guessing he's probably not wrong and your experience was probably an example of him hitting social/political roadblocks. In my arguably limited human sized experience, the vast majority of people at Meta-sized companies prefer the safety and comfort of things going slowly and being discussed at length, and being careful to respect all the hoops that need jumping through. And not having their caged shaken too much. This leads to 5% GPU utilization.

DonHopkins 4y ago
Do you mean Meta-sized or Meta-stasized? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi

slim 4y ago

By reading between the lines of your story and carmack's, my guess is carmack was against facebook user profiling in VR headsets, and you think the sales numbers are sufficient and prove him wrong. If that's the case I'm with Carmack both because "the ideological background" and because the sales argument does not hold : you don't know what the sales would have been (and will be in the future) if facebook did not strong arm users into surrendering their privacy

codemac 4y ago
This.. this is not true at all. The comments on his internal post elucidate where the conflict is, but it's a larger strategic choice about where Meta should be investing. It is more about his comments here: https://venturebeat.com/mobile/oculus-cto-carmack-downplays-consumer-ar-calls-magic-leap-overhyped/ https://venturebeat.com/mobile/oculus-cto-carmack-downplays-...

enqk 4y ago

What comes to mind is how hard it is to get low-latency user experiences out of a comglometate of teams exchanging data via blocks. I would expect someone like Carmack to have to interact with such teams in ways that they’ll find intrusive

grumbel 4y ago

> It was Oculus Go, and by every metric is was a commercial, financial, and technical, disaster. It was the second best selling VR headset at that time, only behind PSVR1. The only problem with it was that it came too late. GearVR had been around since 2015 already, Go was essentially just a standalone version of that, but it took until 2018 to release. That was simply to late, as a year later it was replaced by the Quest1 and 3DOF VR was killed. Another problem with the Go was that Facebook didn't put effort into good 3DOF content. They never released a VR180-3D camera. Never build their own VR video platform. And finally they made Quest2 deliberately incompatible with Go, despite Quest1 still having some compatibility. There was and still is a lot of unnecessary fracturing going on in the VR space, even among Meta's own headsets. I think the Go line should simple have been continued with a stronger focus on movie instead of gaming. The Nreal Air shows what is possible when going that direction and Meta with an 8 year head start should have an easy time matching that. Instead we only got Quest2, which is much more heavy and low resolution than it needs to be for a movie headset.

edem 4y ago

Given the fact that this is a throwaway account your credibility on this matter is less then zero. In fact this sounds like as if your project was shut down by Carmack and now your ego is bruised.

Patrol8394 4y ago

Steve Jobs once said: “ It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to to , We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”

knighthack 4y ago

I'm gonna dismiss this whole story, since it's anonymous, while the person you're criticizing (Carmack) isn't. First, we have no idea what "evidence" or "data" you allege that disproved Carmack, or how Carmack insisted on being right "from an ideological background" (whether that even happened at all). Second, Carmack is one of the most data-driven and performance-oriented programmers you can find, and is quick to admit errors where he is wrong; to suggest that he is ideology-first (which, from his Twitter and public statements, has never been the case) over truth in tech matters - is bonkers-insane. And it's such an easy thing to call out someone you dislike as "toxic", just because you disagree with them. Your statement also makes no sense: the phrase 'politely toxic' is an oxymoron - as when one 'politely disagrees', it suggests reasonable disagreement, not outright difficultness. Further, "good, and in some cases legally required, work" can be work that have nothing to do with the end goals - it could even be baseline administrative work.