12 ms·

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 oft

• 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.
  • threatripper 4y ago
    It does not ensure it but it is the best indicator we have.
    • moralestapia 4y ago
      Not at all! There's even a fallacy named after that, come on.
      • bt4u 4y ago
        There's even a fallacy named after using fallacies to dismiss people, come on.
      • lajamerr 4y ago
        Let's say we have 2 people in two different walks of life. Jim and Alice. Both of them are entrepreneurs and like doing startups. Both of their goals are to take a startup from idea to $1 Billion+ IPO in 2 years and exit and then start the next start-up. If they don't reach 1 Billion IPO they just exit. After 20 years. Jim and Alice have both attempted 10 startups. Jim has reached the goal 2 out of 10 times. While Alice has reached the goal 8 out of 10 times. Would it be a fallacy to bet on Alice if you had to invest in either Jim or Alice's startup?
        • moralestapia 4y ago
          Yes. There's plenty of other variables at play. e.g. Jim built two huge public companies, while Alice reached "the goal" of selling them early and fast. Jim's on food while Alice's on real estate, and the new bet has to do with food. Jim's bootstrapped while Alice is not. Jim's on hard tech while Alice does web3 stuff. There's a reason why "past performance is no guarantee of future results".
          • Eisenstein 4y ago
            That is an indication of why the particulars are important, but not defining what makes the argument fallacious. For instance 'ad hominem' is a fallacy because attacking a person making an argument doesn't make the argument incorrect. Relying on past behavior to indicate future success is also what you just did, but you were more specific about the inputs.
• tinus_hn 4y ago
  Even if the statement were true, it’s not like they hired some anonymous guy, they knew what they were getting. Don’t hire a passionate guy like that if you don’t want him to concern himself with your company.
  • DonHopkins 4y ago
    It's Facebook's fault for hiring him for a figurehead to not listen to, instead of hiring him for what he is to shake things up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog Sometimes a smug frog like Facebook just needs a good poisonous stab in the back. It's not like they should be shocked after hiring a guy who was famous for making a game about shooting Nazis.
• comfypotato 4y ago
  At risk of upsetting this thread’s balance and reducing it to negativity: I prefer your parent comment’s interpretation of the Go. “Ahead of its time”? Technology is the last space where a newfangled product would lose momentum by being released to early. I’m open to being proved ignorant here. Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted? Subscription music services like Rhapsody provided what Apple Music does now 15 years ago, and they died out (similarly Microsoft’s Zune service). Maybe this is what you’re saying? - All the same, I would trump these examples up to poor marketing, management, and product specifics. Apple Music isn’t releasing their service at a better time. They just put a lot more effort into it, and it provides the service better. (Their phone ecosystem plays a big part in this.) This example could be extended into saying that the Go just wasn’t good enough (thus: Carmack failed). FWIW: I’m a Carmack fan, and I base a lot of how I use Emacs on his wisdom accumulated over the years. For example, his recent shift to VSCode has inspired me to think in that direction.
  • cudgy 4y ago
    > Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted? TabletPC and Newton before it.
  • swordsmith 4y ago
    > I’m open to being proved ignorant here. Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted? Google glass as an AR device
  • chrisco255 4y ago
    > Can you think of some examples where tech was obviously ahead of its time and not accepted? Uh yeah, VR itself as a concept and models of VR have been live since the 80s but were especially hyped in the 90s but never went anywhere beyond amusement parks and arcades. And no one wanted to touch VR in the 00s despite huge leaps in processing power. I would even argue the original Macintosh was ahead of its time, maybe because it was too expensive and too hard to upgrade. As a result, DOS and Windows and IBM clones took the PC market, despite coming later and initially being inferior. Lots of such examples in history.
• moralestapia 4y ago
  >who got their idea shut down by Carmack once and is still bitter about it Nice fantasy you created there to support your argument. Have you heard of "don't shoot the messenger"? I admire Carmack as much all other hackers around. I don't sympathize with many of Meta's practices. Still, it's entirely plausible that GP's experience holds truth. I've been around the equivalent of people like Carmack in academia and all of them have their dash of arrogance and petulance, sometimes this leads them to take really bad decisions. Also, engineering skills and management skills are different things. And there's Peter's Principle as well, to which Carmack is not exempt either.
  • Shorel 4y ago
    There's almost no one like Carmack in academia. Academic experience writing papers vs actual industry experience to the point of creating new technologies and new markets almost by himself are definitely not equivalent. So, as much as I would be a bit judgemental about academics opinions, I would definitely listen to Carmack.
    • brailsafe 4y ago
      Academia can mean a lot of things, some of which have obvious parallels to industry. He may deserve a pedestal in some respects, and I'd listen to him too, but it should be tempered.
    • _yb2s 4y ago
      Academia is about writing papers in the same way industry is about writing ad copy…. You have to do the project before you write a paper about it.
  • MrScruff 4y ago
    I think the point was that any large enough company will have a ton of politics related to decisions around technology, so one person's anonymous perspective shouldn't carry much/any weight.
  • bee_rider 4y ago
    The person’s whole story was entirely based around their anonymous word. The follow up comment reads to me like a narrative way of pointing they out. We don’t really know, I guess, what happened internally. But: * Carmack has tossed some grenades as he left, so if there’s a real story there I guess we’re likely to hear about it from some non-anonymous sources soon enough if he was a real pain. * He’s gone now, so we’ll see to what extent he was holding them back shortly. I bet we hear nothing and they never release anything, but I won’t claim to have an uncle who works at ~~Nintendo~~ Facebook.
• gompertz 4y ago
  • turbobooster 4y ago
    Stop slandering people due to school training. We all understood what the person meant and I guess you got confused too many times.
  • steve76 4y ago
  • DoingIsLearning 4y ago
    > trying to be convincing on technical issues when you can't understand fundamentals of English is not persuasive at all. Note to disprove your point but there are plenty of very technically capable people who learn English as a second, third, fourth language. In fact I would say in technical settings, such as here, that this is statistically more common than a native English speaker with poor writing skills.
    • xiphias2 4y ago
      There is/are and their sound very different in other languages, so I would say that people who speak English as a second language generally make these types of mistakes less often than natural speakers who learned speaking English many years before writing. (We make other types of mistakes more often though).
      • icoder 4y ago
        As a non-native Enlish speaker I'd like an n=1 'experience' to your n=1 'would say': the English is in my head first and then in writing. So at the time of writing there and their already sound alike and van be easily mixed up
        • xiphias2 4y ago
          This is true, but I (and you) learned to say and read/write these words at the same time, so we have an advantage over native English speakers in differentiating them. At the same time the poster had a larger vocabulary than I have (which is true for native speakers generally, as I try to stay within simple English).
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• beowulfey 4y ago
  Carmack has been around a long time, and I’ve never heard a word about him that rings true to the PC. Anyone on here worked with him in the past?
  • SideQuark 4y ago
    Read the John Romero stuff. Even Carmack explains in the Lex Friedman interview how badly Carmack treated him. Carmack also presents enough in that interview to expect this take us quite likely correct. All from Carmacks own mouth.
    • GuB-42 4y ago
      This is... confusing. Especially considering that there are two (unrelated) Carmacks: John and Adrian, both cofounders of id software. As for John Romero, he did a lot of "stuff".
      • SideQuark 4y ago
        How is it confusing? The way Carmack treated Romero is famous, and the recent Lex Fridman interview of Carmack even has it admitted by Carmack. Carmack, in the same interview, explains how he is an asshole to people that work(ed) with him at Meta. Listen to the interview, and see if Carmack sounds like a reasonable boos, able to get the best from his staff, or sounds like someone that would cause serious friction. I'd pick the latter, from his own description of how he treats people. He's a good programmer. He'd be absolutely terrible to work with or for.
• masteranza 4y ago
  You're exactly right.
• grumbel 4y ago
  The Go was certainly not "ahead of it's time". It was a standalone version of the GearVR, which was released three years earlier. At the same time Oculus released the Go with 3DOF tracking, Google released the Lenovo Mirage Solo with 6DOF tracking. That said, there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the Go. It was and still is, the cheapest entry point into VR. The lack of features made it much more lightweight and comfortable than its successors, which also cost double of the Go. The only real problem with the Go is that Facebook didn't continue that line of product. There is plenty of room for a 3DOF/2D content focused headset, but Facebook never really cared about that area of VR.