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How does any company burn $36 billion on a headset they got handed a prototype for? At a reasonable $100k/yr and 50% overhead, that's 240,000 years of labor.
by araes 3y ago
How does any company burn $36 billion on a headset they got handed a prototype for?
At a reasonable $100k/yr and 50% overhead, that's 240,000 years of labor. ~5000 human lifetimes. At a .gov labor rate of 2080 hrs/yr, that's 500,000,000 hrs of work wasted? For mediocre "not a product rendering" that looks like 90's Second Life? I'm not usually the graphic resolution crowd, yet that was rather underwhelming. Could'a just taken a picture of the inside of the Quest view and it would have been better.
Trying to avoid humble bragging, yet last year I put in four government proposals (one 20-pager, rest were 5-10), wrote a web app, converted a NIST matrix package to a different language, and wrote a mixed Android / Windows app for cross-communication. I may have observer bias, and not be representative. However, that was one year, not 5000 lifetimes... You'd think they would have more than a single game as their killer app. Not even Pokemon Go or similar? It's such an obvious previous idea.
- azinman2 3y ago100k/yr is not reasonable for Bay Area, let alone top talent. There are people working on it making $1M/yr+. Junior developers straight out of college are making more at Meta. You're also assuming everything went to just engineering payroll, which is obviously not true.
- araes 3y agoThen FB/Meta's throwing money out the door on people who demonstrably do not deserve $1M+/yr. And on that topic, same with Wikipedia, why "must" you have your development base in the most expensive place on the West Coast? Per https://www.gamedevmap.com/ https://www.gamedevmap.com/ there are Many other, less expensive, locations. America has a bunch, even Africa has gamedevs. They're an International megacorp, with 3 billion monthly active user (probably still a lot of dupes). India has the largest FB audience (366 million, 2024), not America (100 million). Will an Indian developer make you a launch app for less than $1M+/yr? New Dehli has 17 game studios (including Riot Games) and Mumbai has 33 (Ubisoft Mumbai and Pune).
- danielmarkbruce 3y agoHow is it demonstrable that they aren't worth $1m per year? While in many cases folks are overpaid in big tech, some of them are insanely talented people who can do things others simply cannot.
- bobsomers 3y ago> How is it demonstrable that they aren't worth $1m per year? Probably because of this: > How does any company burn $36 billion on a headset they got handed a prototype for?
- danielmarkbruce 3y agoThat's confusing the decision to work on something with the quality of the folks working on it. Brilliant engineers often work on things which are risky from a market perspective. It doesn't make them less brilliant at engineering when it turns out there isn't a market for the thing. John Carmack appears to be brilliant. I'd guess he would admit the VR market didn't turn out as hoped.
- lostmsu 3y ago> he would admit the VR market didn't turn out as hoped That's not what he said though. What he said is that Meta is basically incompetent.
- danielmarkbruce 3y agoAnd from a leadership perspective it might well be / might have been. I don't think he ever criticized the quality of engineers there.
- throwup238 3y agoThe numbers aren't all that much more palatable at 24,000 man-years, assuming $1M average TC. That's equivalent to the amount of labor it took to build some of the minor Egyptian pyramids.
- bee_rider 3y agoI want to make a snarky comment about how any reasonable person would want 10x that to work for Facebook but 500 human lifetimes is still a wild amount of time for what they’ve gotten.
- TiredOfLife 3y agoThey didn't and they didn't.
- boloust 3y agoIn terms of difficulty/complexity, nothing you've listed there comes anywhere close to the r&d required to go from the original oculus prototype to volume shipping the meta quest 3.