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.

Of the many things that cooled my interest in VR, the presence of Facebook in the space is near the top.

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&#x27;m honestly surprised it lasted as long as it did.

That was a good read. But I&#x27;m not sure about Carmack being the canary.The idea was then that if he left quickly over ethical matters, it would be a sign of something was really wrong. But Carmack didn&#x27;t leave quickly. It&#x27;s been almost 9 years. And none of the reasons he cites have to do with openness, transparency, or abuse of user data.

This blogpost from 2014 has been an almost perfect predictor of the last few years of the Meta disaster. It misses some stuff, but it&#x27;s not really wrong anywhere beyond some minor details. It calls out Carmack as being the canary that will ultimately predict Oculus&#x2F;Meta&#x27;s future.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;assayviaessay.blogspot.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;03&#x2F;virtual-spaces-real-data.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;assayviaessay.blogspot.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;03&#x2F;virtual-spaces-re...</a>

Oh wow. What he’s describing really resonates with me. Working in software, I feel it’s almost dichotomous in its nature that people absolutely coast or absolutely give a damn. It can be so difficult to work on a coasting team. And otherwise, it’s torture to your soul not to give a damn around people who do (if you care, I guess).In his role I can see that being a genuine struggle, arguably worse than what I’ve encountered. I’ve rarely had agency to effect change, or even the illusion of it. In his case, it must have felt as though he should be able to get things on course somehow. That would be frustrating.

His note to Meta: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.vn&#x2F;t6zQp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.vn&#x2F;t6zQp</a>

He hasn&#x27;t seemed happy since the beginning. So this was a surprise to me. I thought he would leave after something vested, but that doesn&#x27;t seem to have determined the timing.

There is a pay wall, so I haven&#x27;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&#x27;s public perception, particularly in Carmack&#x27;s department, seemed to be plummeting. It seemed very likely that this would happen, but maybe I&#x27;m projecting too much. I imagined myself being deeply ungratified in his role.

We&#x27;ve since changed the URL from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;john-carmack-meta-consulting-cto-virtual-reality-leaving-2022-12" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;john-carmack-meta-consulting...</a>, which that URL is a copy of. to the letter that everyone is responding to.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;sfnzN" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;sfnzN</a>

Have a listen to some interviews. Doing it out of love for the problem more so than anything else.
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=I845O57ZSy4">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=I845O57ZSy4</a>

I don’t think you’d need to be alone in solving the AGI problem.Carmack is an engineer at heart. I am sure there are some yet undiscovered technical blockers in that space that he will solve.

If you solve a few more problems with chatgpt it&#x27;s going to become useful enough that people are going to stop caring so much about the AGI label. It&#x27;s going to quack like a duck enough to change a lot of industries.

I believe we&#x27;re still 15 years out from AGI, but I also think we could start creating autonomous agents right now that make people feel like it&#x27;s almost AGI. I think Carmack could get something out the door that feels like that.

I also think he&#x27;s going to lose it massively (technical background aside, i.e. he&#x27;s not an applied mathematician, it&#x27;s a huge problem) BUT the AI industry is currently run with a very childish approach to software and programming, if his company can attack the infrastructure wisely they could really improve the industry. No idea how to make that money money though.

It’s not exactly a bold predction that someone will fail to solve a grand, millennia-old problem of philosophy and science.

Honestly seems like a better fit for him than VR. VR may be games, but everyone is saying his strengths are technical, not organizational. Seems like he wants to work on hard technical problems and thats what he&#x27;s good at.

It&#x27;s as if nobody&#x27;s learned anything from the &#x27;self-driving car&#x27; boondoggle of the last 20 years or so.Any problem can seem easy when you don&#x27;t know the things you don&#x27;t know.

I suspect he&#x27;s going to get smacked hard by the AGI problem and ultimately concede defeat on his biggest goal while achieving some success in the current less-than-general ML stuff.

If you solve AGI, all business is your plan.

It wouldn&#x27;t surprise me if he has a noncompete in play that prevents him from continuing his VR work for a few years.

I think it&#x27;s less of a judgement about VR and more of a judgement about AI. If you believe AGI is within reach (as he does and I agree), working on literally anything else seems like a waste of time. It&#x27;s impossible to overstate the impact it will have.

&gt;That&#x27;s another sign to me that VR is once again not going anywhereMaybe it&#x27;s just a sign of how hot AI is right now.

Try it yourself. Strap something 8 hours or longer around your head, don&#x27;t move, because every small tremor distorts the vision of the device.VR in its current form is eye cocaine, nothing more. Why watch poppy avatars hop around in a virtual reality, while you are bound to do nothing?In every way, VR should be restricted to very few use cases, not to - hello Zuck - rebuild reality completely and hereby track everything you do or see to deliver even more addictive material to your eye vision.It sounds cool, some use cases look cool, but the very fact that hardly anyone at Meta uses their own device&#x2F;creature, speaks volumes. I am glad, JC takes consequences and abandons this experiment.

&gt; That&#x27;s another sign to me that VR is once again not going anywhereThat&#x27;s not Carmack&#x27;s opinion. To quote from his post:&quot;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.&quot;&quot;the fight is still winnable! VR can bring value to most of the people in the world&quot;The main problem with VR in my opinion is a lack of software. Most of the games produced have been either toys that are little more than a tech demo, or ports of other games not designed around VR. There haven&#x27;t been many serious attempts to harness VR for non-game playing purposes.I think the future is still bright for VR. We&#x27;re currently in a bit of a local hype-cycle trough, but the tech is only going to improve.

Or maybe you know he is simply a lot more excited about AI than VR now and that&#x27;s it. No need to stick with something that doesn&#x27;t excite you any more just because you were excited about it at one point and spent several years working on it :-)

I’d wait and see how Apple’s device is received before making any long-range pronouncements.

It&#x27;s very interesting to me that he&#x27;s giving up on VR entirely. If he thought it was just an issue with Facebook, presumably he&#x27;d jump in somewhere else and get the impact he was looking to have.That&#x27;s another sign to me that VR is once again not going anywhere. Or rather, half of it isn&#x27;t. Oculus-style VR is two best in one: 3D persistent virtual worlds and stereoscopic facehugger interfaces. The former has had great success, mostly in games, but the latter has spent decades as the thing that people are supposed to want but don&#x27;t actually use much when they get the chance.

He believes that AGI is an engineering problem because of the vast compute resource required for it. Being an engineering problem he believes he can make an impact.

+1 to changing the post to Carmack&#x27;s published post on Facebook or Twitter without the Business Insider fluff.

Why would he change the link? We&#x27;re discussing this article.

I think it is based on id Software&#x27;s Commander Keen[0] game.[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Commander_Keen" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Commander_Keen</a>

Keen Technologies. That’s a great name.

&gt;he&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t yield much in the way of results in pure research or practical application. Machine learning and other hat tricks aren&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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.

He just founded a new company called Keen Technologies to work on AGI. Not surprising that he wants to focus on that now. He&#x27;s been part-time at Meta for years. I&#x27;m interested to find out what kind of business model he&#x27;s planning for an AGI company.Edit: he posted his leaving message publicly here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;100006735798590&#x2F;posts&#x2F;pfbid0iPixEvPJQGzNa6t2x6HUL5TYqfmKGqSgfkBg6QaTyHF5frXQi7eLGxC7uPQv5U5jl&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;100006735798590&#x2F;posts&#x2F;pfbid0iPixEvP...</a>Additional public comments on Twitter here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;ID_AA_Carmack&#x2F;status&#x2F;1603931901491908610" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;ID_AA_Carmack&#x2F;status&#x2F;1603931901491908610</a>&gt; As anyone who listens to my unscripted Connect talks knows, I have always been pretty frustrated with how things get done at FB&#x2F;Meta. Everything necessary for spectacular success is right there, but it doesn&#x27;t get put together effectively.&gt; I thought that the &quot;derivative of delivered value&quot; 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?

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&#x27;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: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mentalmodels4life.net&#x2F;2021&#x2F;01&#x2F;04&#x2F;safi-bahcalls-innovation-equation&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mentalmodels4life.net&#x2F;2021&#x2F;01&#x2F;04&#x2F;safi-bahcalls-innov...</a>There&#x27;s even an equation that describes this phenomenon

All the money in the world can&#x27;t buy talent. If the talented people don&#x27;t want to work for or with you, then you end up just burning through cash while the untalented&#x2F;less talented deliver a subpar product.

As a small company veteran -it absolutely happens at that level as well.

After all, isn&#x27;t this how every action within any corporation is set into motion? →&quot;We want to make more money.&quot;
→ 
&quot;How can we make more money?&quot;
→ 
&quot;These are the ways we can make more money.&quot;
→ 
&quot;Which of these ways is the cheapest to execute now &#x2F; maintain later?&quot;
→ 
&quot;Make this.&quot;It&#x27;s only coincidental if an action aligns with the interests of anyone outside the corporation.In fact, this is how it works within any group in human civilization, sometimes substituting &quot;money&quot; with &quot;power&quot;.

Or the typical poor execution at extremely large tech companies. Where various people have incentives that aren&#x27;t aligned with the overall objective of making a good product. Instead people are incentivized to empire build and be self serving.

What is the ROI of the xbox series over time?

But in the case of the Xbox they knew there&#x27;d be an appetite for a gaming console, because gaming consoles had been selling like hot cakes for over 15 years.VR is a very differently-sized market.

I have a quest pro, and it’s pretty awesome. Zuckerberg made the argument that Microsoft spent about 10 billion on development of the first Xbox, and that turned out to be a good bet.

He&#x27;s one man. Could be him, could be the team, could be the overall management structure pushed the team into wasting time on dead-end pursuits.

IT projects fuck up all the time. Poor execution is baked into the human DNA. It doesn&#x27;t take malice or crime to fail to be excellent. Neither the Newton nor Google glasses failed on corruption. Carmack is smart but he also failed to make his rocketry mark. Maybe individual brilliance in code is less important to execution of things than we (he?) thinks? Or maybe he only picks targets with hard end-goals versus the easy marks?

Man that&#x27;s such a common story in big organizations. I wonder if there&#x27;s any way of creating a culture that fights against this.

&gt; self-promotion, office politics, and collecting wins for themselvesA pal who was a manager at a FAANG said, &quot;If you give people one game to play, they&#x27;re going to play it very energetically.&quot; He was speaking of the promotion game, of course.

For what it&#x27;s worth this also happens at smaller tech companies where the product is highly profitable and every department is siloed.

Just here to echo a similar experience- FAANG competitor that is (thankfully) left out of the acronym

I worked for the three largest mining companies in the world, and a much smaller miner before that. The small company had 1 geologist, 1 mining engineer, 1 general manager and an office admin person. The next place I went to was a similar sized mine with about 200 people in the office, and many more support people in the city. The resource was 1:1 coal to dirt and much higher quality, compared to the previous place which was 1:13 coal to dirt and way harder to mine. The large miners have the best resources in the world so they can afford to over-hire, those people don&#x27;t actually do anything but make things worse doing &quot;improvement projects&quot;, and then use bullshit charts to show why it&#x27;s better. We had a huge downturn in mining about 15 years ago and they fired about 15,000 people across Australia, and overall production improved! I only work for startups now where I can be a core engineer, I had a role before where I knew I wasn&#x27;t doing anything valuable and it&#x27;s soul crushing, I feel sorry for those FAANG engineers who can&#x27;t break free from the golden handcuffs and actually do something valuable with their time.

This isn’t something limited to big tech companies - this is ubiquitous. Humans automatically optimise for the greatest reward for the least effort. It turns out, office politics and self-promotion are a lot better for your career than being good at what you do.Therefore, everywhere you go, people are usually where they are not because of competence in their professional domain, but due to competence in the social arts. You see true creativity, throughout history, from tiny enterprises (a fistful of people, no hierarchy to compete for, an actual shared goal) and from individuals. Never corporations. They just do more of the same, at scale, which makes up for their aching inefficiencies.I watched my business grow from a fistful of coders to a political hellscape. Even no hierarchy has a hierarchy. Us apes just can’t be without it.Many labour under the misapprehension that hard work will be noticed and rewarded. This is not so, and never will be, as long as humans are involved.

IMHO, that’s almost natural in large organizations, it’s just a function of the structure and worker KPI.

I left FAANG basically because you had to play the politics and self-promotion game to get promoted.  Woe be unto you if you worked on a &quot;leaf&quot; system -- something that consumed internal services but did not expose services to other engineering teams.  You would have no internal engineers willing to vouch for your promotion because they weren&#x27;t using your service or codebase.  I really wanted to just execute and be rewarded without having to invest excess energy in marketing myself internally in the company.

I think a lot of that is the unofficial stack ranking all the FAANGs are using. It always pays to self-promote since the marginal difference between you and another person on the team might be zero. But if you&#x27;ve been promoting yourself to your manager and the other team member hasn&#x27;t, you get RSUs&#x2F;bonus while they get a PIP. You can even have lower actual performance but if your self-promotion is better than their output you get rewards while they get a PIP.

it&#x27;s so wild to me that FAANG has these hiring walls set up — like crazy coding challenges — only for the best engineers to then do work equivalent to what you see at gov&#x27;t or consulting jobs.Why do they make it so hard to work for them, just for their employees to play status games?

I wish Elon didn&#x27;t get sucked into culture wars, because slimming down Twitter&#x27;s workforce wasn&#x27;t a bad ideaI fantasized about someone buying Google and slimming it down too, because it used to be a great place to work (I worked there for over a decade). There were lots of great builders but they got drowned out by careeristsIn fact I worked in the SF office around &quot;fail whale&quot; times at Twitter (2009), and there was a steady trickle of coworkers over to Twitter. Though from what I hear the leadership there was the real problem, and allowed the other problem to fester

The entire incentive structure and cycle at FAANG and FAANG-like companies requires relentless self-promotion and buck-passing not just to move up but to _not get fired_. Many of these companies have levels with a clock attached, where if too many quarters pass while you&#x27;re at that level you&#x27;re automatically managed out. If you don&#x27;t get promoted you get fired, and the way to get promoted is to get relentlessly good at the perf cycle metagame.

That&#x27;s a lesson we all learn, and most of us learn it the hard way.

Working for 2x FAANGs, management incentives engineers to work on new features and not on integration testing and optimization. Quality, testing, automation are highly looked down upon and generally don&#x27;t give huge refreshers come review time. However QA, automation, and testing are not only looked down in FAANG, but the majority of companies and engineers. How often do you see engineers in any company call themselves test engineers? How often do you find a software engineer who wants to work as a test engineer? There&#x27;s a hidden snobbery in the industry against quality, testing, and automation engineering.

That is a bit too much of a generalization. I mean, sure, what you describe does in all likelihood exist somewhere in some capacity in any company that is large enough (and likely many smaller ones as well), because &quot;humans&quot;, but to pretend that this trait is so endemic to work in a large organization is just wrong.Because meanwhile, HN thread after HN thread was, for example, fawning over (very real) gains that some new technology brings (be it, say, the monitor you&#x27;re staring at), while generally using a staggering amount of products coming out of large organizations. And before you think that there is a lot to complain about those products sometimes, there is also a very large amount of stuff that you don&#x27;t complain about, that just works, and so you don&#x27;t consciously think about it very much.This work is put together by many passionate people at those organizations. Some of them are very passionate, and some of them feel that a small company would not have the resources to do the same level of work with the same impact.Incidentally, I never cared about promotion at all, I just did the work that I wanted to held up to my own standards and those formed by my peers, and I got promoted because of the outcomes. I am honest when I say that it came as a pleasant surprise each time. And I do have quite a number of peers who seem to think and work similarly around me.

&gt; The big tech company game has deviated very far from execution.This is yet another reason why I&#x27;m certain the whole metaverse project will fail.If this moonshot had any chance of succeeding, the only way is to give this project entirely over to a someone who is passionate about the vision and has an incredible track record of execution.Even if it where the case that Carmack where being ignored I would feel like that&#x27;s a bad sign, but him being driven out by the culture means that nothing of substance will really happen. Certainly not the industry changing break through they&#x27;re hoping for.In the last decade Meta has had no impressive, game changing releases (unlike say Apple that has several), clearly the current culture is not great at solving hard problems. Sticking with that culture to see something like the metaverse through is hopeless.

I wonder if I work at the same company you describe.

There&#x27;s a strong bias for &quot;just world hypothesis&quot; stories like this one. Someone wealthy has to be poor in other areas. Someone smart must also be dumb. In fairness, to strive for anything you must have faith in a just world, that your efforts won&#x27;t just be dashed by bad luck or a cheater. That doesn&#x27;t mean it reflects reality though. It&#x27;s just a story to help us sleep at night.

It&#x27;s just infinitely more profitable to build up social capitals and leverage network effects and stage wins in this world, where economic utility is determined purely by subjective judgements and payments are autonomously collected. It makes no sense to construct a municipal road bridge when $15 gratuity transaction for 5% conversion from a social media post with million Likes pays more. Fortunately we are not there yet, but not far away either.

I did Google for ten years and I&#x27;d say this: SRE culture at Google is solid, with excellent skills and knowledge about how to build and run services at scale. Unfortunately it&#x27;s mostly their own custom bespoke stuff, so those skills don&#x27;t immediately translate into a new org. But they can.SWE is more of a mixed bag. There are obviously incredibly bright people doing cutting edge software development at Google. But on the whole must of us were just doing very modest and incremental changes on protobuf shuffling super yak-shaved services that someone else had built the foundation of.The transferrable and useful skills one gets out of someone trained in a FAANG is the ability to produce well explained tested well documented code incrementally and in a respectful and well discussed code review process.The workplace culture stuff, again, mixed bag. Certainly to survive and thrive there, you needed to be thinking what to write about in perf twice a year, and it&#x27;s such a constant that there were seminars and &quot;how to get promoted&quot; sessions where the whole self-promotional side of things was discussed in depth.

It makes a certain kind of sense. Many FAANG companies are in such a dominating business position due to network effects and the like that they capture a massive economic surplus, and when organization capture huge economic surpluses, the employees are less incentivized to help the company succeed (since that’s going to happen anyway) and more incentivized to extract what they can personally.

I always wonder how &quot;old silicon valley&quot; work culture would compare to the current one? How was it like working for Sun Microsystems in the 90s? Digital in the 80s?

Dang, man. Where do you work that this ruthless self promotion (and denigration of all else) is not the norm? That’s been my experience throughout my 27 years, in 3 Fortune 250’s AND 2 mom-and-pop’s.

There&#x27;s a very real &quot;We used to do xyz at Facebook&quot; issue sometimes.Just because it worked for them (if that even) doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s automatically a good idea.

&gt; This pattern—massive outlays followed by poor, possibly-rushed possibly-underpowered workmanship—sounds remarkably like corruption.I worked at a medium-sized company that went through a phase of hiring ex-FAANG people, thinking we&#x27;d improve our quality by implementing FAANG practices.It did the opposite: The ex-FAANG people were absolutely masterful at self-promotion, office politics, and collecting wins for themselves while shifting blame for anything that didn&#x27;t work.The strange thing was that many of them were actually good programmers when it came down to it. It seemed like they had been conditioned by their FAANG employers to put self-promotion and survival above everything else, which turned into an extremely toxic trait once they were removed from FAANG managers who were playing the same game. The company had to steadily ratchet down the levels of trust and independence granted to teams, while steadily increasing the amount of management oversight and process to keep them within bounds.Now whenever I see famous builders and founders leave FAANG companies out of frustration, I get it. The big tech company game has deviated very far from execution.

Like Tesla FSD, it&#x27;s a knob for the company&#x27;s share price. All VC-adjacent moonshots are. They&#x27;re the encroachment of symbolism into capitalist systems of value.

&gt; sounds remarkably like corruptionIn the sense of external entities illegally hoovering up cash, I doubt it. For me this seems more like Soviet central planning, where real-world success is secondary to conformance to big ideas imposed from top personalities. It can work when the idea is correct, useful, and resonant with the people implementing it. But when the idea&#x27;s off, political realities prevent honest feedback from rising up to the level where it can have an effect, so everybody just goes through the motions and things slowly fall apart. A reality explained by the ancient bit of capitalist samizdat, &quot;The Plan&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.mnstate.edu&#x2F;alm&#x2F;humor&#x2F;ThePlan.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.mnstate.edu&#x2F;alm&#x2F;humor&#x2F;ThePlan.htm</a>

The more I understand about how many risks and problems are involved in running an organization as large and with as high a social profile as Meta, with all the accrued obligations and entrenched loyalties and overpromising managers that glom on over time, all while building new unproven technological infrastructure, the more sympathy I have for how blurry the line between corruption and implosion is.I don&#x27;t think anybody trusts Facebook at this point, and the idea of being forced into a pay for play virtual world controlled by a single company is understandably scary and deserving of criticism, but at the same time I&#x27;ve done social VR and I truly and honestly believe it&#x27;s a vast improvement over any other existing kind of remote interaction. I actually get and believe in the vision, it just seems like the execution is really bloated&#x2F;bad and they tried to way over abstract things&#x2F;make things way too big way too early. I could see how spending that amount of money would be easy to do if you&#x27;re trying to create universal abstractions for making, selling, creating, stitching services for an interactive set of 3D environments together that is easy for people to make &quot;apps&quot; for, building data centers, accounting for latency, building out supply chains, subsiding hardware, doing R&amp;D on tracking, doing social research, and dealing with entrenched employees and middle managers accustomed to &quot;the cushy tech worker lifestyle&quot;.You really have to try social VR to understand how much better it is than video chatting or text channels. There&#x27;s absolutely something to it. There&#x27;s so much more information in the way people interact about what their intentions are, how they feel about what you&#x27;re saying, what they&#x27;re interested in, etc when you&#x27;re interacting in VR with a 3D avatar.All that being said, the virtual real estate and clear corporate &quot;branding&quot; angle is really gross, regardless of whether the money gets shady&#x2F;you could really call that &quot;corrupt&quot;. I prefer the wide range in quality but genuine effort and creativeness you get with a free and open ecosystem like VRChat.

&gt; It pains me to hear people say that they don&#x27;t even get their headset out to show off at the company because they know it&#x27;s going to be a mess of charging and updating before they can make it do something cool.He has a point. The tens of billions of dollars seem to be mostly dedicated to adding invasive crap that makes the experience worse.After the last update I had to &quot;sync my Meta account&quot; before I could do anything. I had to log in on the PC (with my headset on) and enter a code shown on the headset on my PC. Yea, that&#x27;s fumbly.Oh and after the latest update may play area is apparently too small for room scale mode, it always forces me back to stationary mode. What a mess.This was after using the device just fine for two years without such boondoggle.

If I understand the situation correctly, there are different headsets aiming to solve different goals, and there are projects to integrate each headset into a headset that has all the desired features.I think it&#x27;s a push to be first to market with a headset that serves as the foundation for a monopoly on metaverse-like platforms.

In that talk he was talking about Horizon specifically and not Quest 2.

“During Meta&#x27;s developer conference in October, Carmack hosted a solo hour-long talk about the company&#x27;s Oculus or Quest headset. He admitted he had many things to be ‘grumpy’ about, like the company&#x27;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.

I completely agree with this sentiment.I think VR has the same issue that smartphones had at the start of their cycle, the UI&#x2F;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&#x2F;latency&#x2F;tracking) but full VR is almost only useful for games.As much as I&#x27;m not an Apple-enthusiast, the one thing they (used to) get right is the sort of UX where you almost don&#x27;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&#x27;m not convinced their alternative AR&#x2F;VR UI will be that though.I&#x27;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.

One cool thing Apple can do is display mirroring from all your devices into VR. They also have 3D models of all their products, so they can redraw your devices inside VR without needing to use see-through AR. Keyboard, mouse and display with mirrored UI. iPhone and Watch too.

I rarely put my VR headset on because I have to COMMIT to it and stop doing everything else; i.e. no host OS&#x27;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.

The whole metaverse concept Facebook is doing honestly reminds me of Neom. Unaccountable god-king has a wild idea based on very real trends, has no real idea how to do it but a limitless supply of money from other things, and the whole concept gets taken over entirely by corruption

The PlayStation has had the ability to keep itself up-to-date while in sleep mode for almost a decade now.

Why don&#x27;t you just turn on auto updates?

Nintendo seems to be the best at this. I pulled my Wii out of storage to play with my 4 year old earlier this month. Plugged it in and was off and running having a blast playing Wii Sports and Mario Kart.

OT, but for consoles you just leave it in sleep-mode and it&#x27;ll update things quietly throughout the day. It&#x27;s more of a problem for desktops

This was my gripe about all console games. Real gamers that are daily users have their systems kept up to date, but I&#x27;m not one of those. I&#x27;m one of those that plays a few times a month, and only when I have nothing else to do. Because of the infrequent use of the console, I&#x27;m guaranteed to have to do an update on every use. The update alone cuts into the time allotted for gaming. So I play even less and less to the point that after my last move (3 years ago), I never even plugged my console in.So I totally sympathize with the loss of enthusiasm for the delays from forced updates.

I manually update every few months. It&#x27;s fine?

That’s the correct quote. The Quest Pro with its wireless charger actually largely solves this problem. Try not using an Android phone for a month, and then use it. It’s the same nightmare (after all the headsets are Android devices with internal batteries).It’s an important gripe, but it will be solved. I think there are more fundamental issues. It’s hard to explain, but even with superphysical level of improvement I don’t see people enmass wearing VR or MR headsets the way we use phones, airpods, and to lesser extent watches.

As an early and complete VR adopter I have ranted in the past on how fast VR loses it&#x27;s luster. But for me the reason is not setup (charging, updating, putting everything into place, et cetera), it&#x27;s software.The good VR games are really good, games like HL Alyx. But after almost 10 years of VR usage I still can&#x27;t name more than 3-7 pieces of VR Software (games included) I would put into the &quot;worth it&quot; category. Anything else is just very short lived, feel like tech demos. Fun? Sure, but ultimately worse than regular software&#x2F;games. Gimmicky overhead, so to speak.Hence why my VR setup is collecting dust most of the time.Seeing Facebook&#x27;s vision for VR, which is just rebuilding products we had as far back as 2003 (Second Life) and even 2014 (VR Chat), but worse and riddled with ads and darkpatterns, is what has made me lose even more of my interest. I have to add that I was an Oculus owner in the past, I am now an Index owner, but what Facebook does is still relevant because they are the &quot;VR believers&quot;, pouring the most money into it.In short: There is just nothing interesting happening, my VR setup is collecting dust. Demoing it to my friends is basically the only thing I do with it nowadays but they lost interest too. I don&#x27;t agree that it&#x27;s a hardware problem, for me it&#x27;s a software problem. Also: too much &quot;vision&quot;, too little actual determined (software) projects.

Basically Carmack is frustrated by:1. Rate of progress on AR&#x2F;VR at meta2. People within Meta not &quot;Giving a Dam!&quot; &#x2F; Poor decisions made within the org3. Poor quality of the execution which I guess is related to #2Relevant quote:
&quot;It pains me to hear people say that they don&#x27;t even get their headset out to show off at the company because they know it&#x27;s going to be a mess of charging and updating before they can make it do something cool,&quot; Carmack said at the time. &quot;VR should be a delight to demo for your friends.&quot;

Who else can bridge the neurotypical spectrum? Maybe Eric Weinstein from the portal but he stopped that.

Honestly his guest list is so good, I thought for several years that he must be working for the Kremlin and honeypotting folks behind the scenes (or something)

network effects mostly. how Joe Rogan did it? not by being a genius. (by being mostly entertaining and a bit informative, and Lex built on this by being mostly informative and almost completely anti-entertaining)

He has the quality of being unformidable. The guests are very relaxed on his show I find. Tim Ferris is similar. Contrast to say Sam Harris, who although very erudite, perspicacious and articulate, asks paragraph long multipart questions and spends around 50% of his air time talking. Tyler Cowen is a better example of a formidable interviewer, who keeps things quite short and punchy and is always a little lighthearted.

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&#x27;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.

Lex&#x27;s guest list is absurd.  I&#x27;m honestly not sure how he&#x27;s managed to pull it off.

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] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lexfridman.com&#x2F;john-carmack&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lexfridman.com&#x2F;john-carmack&#x2F;</a>

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.

John Carmack says himself he wasn&#x27;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.

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

Sure, but it&#x27;s VR. Not making people sick (= low latency) needs to come first

&gt; 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.

Or, you could say that Meta is focused on an audience that doesn&#x27;t have a highish end gaming PC, and have a relatively small budget (say $400), which is probably most. For realistic hardware spread, see: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;hwsurvey&#x2F;Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;hwsurvey&#x2F;Steam-Hardware-Softw...</a>But, they do still support that type of user with AirLink&#x2F;USB. Problem is, there&#x27;s not enough of those users, so many of the developers target Quest users, which where the eyes are.I think a step function in VR quality, which requires a step function in the number of eyes behind a powerful system, will come with PSVR 2.

Carmack was the one who was pushing for mobile.

Meta definitely isn&#x27;t focused on fidelity and graphics. Their mobile VR push degraded VR graphics significantly.

Based on that hour-long talk, I&#x27;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.

The thing that always holds me back is the lack of open datasheet. Then again, I won&#x27;t touch anything with an NDA,so that&#x27;s probably more a me being picky problem.

I just want cool hardware people can hack on. I couldn&#x27;t care less about the metaverse worlds that they were building but I&#x27;m giddy as a child on Christmas at advances in the hardware lately.

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?

I don&#x27;t really think that&#x27;s it, I feel like there is enough prior art (Second Life, VRChat, AltspaceVR, etc.) that we know this has potential and is feasable. Its just that their technology isn&#x27;t even remotely competitive with anything. Its all just a clunky, buggy, uninspired mess.Its everything from their corporate design story that bleeds into every world and avatar, the laughable visual programming tools to create worlds, the proprietary walled-garden approach to horizons, the privacy nightmare that is horizons, the operating system being this hacky unstable Android fork (don&#x27;t ever look at logcat). Its like every single step of the way they made the wrong decisions and executed on them incompetently, no money in the world is going to fix this mess.

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

There is no mandatory Facebook account, anymore. It&#x27;s now a mandatory Meta account. Facebook is only linked if you want it to be. Meta has said that this was in response to disapproval of the mandatory Facebook account.

Forcing a mandatory Facebook account is &quot;doing an ok job&quot;...?

Metaverse as a general concept is not a bad aim and Meta seemed to have some interesting ideas.But their presentation was clumsy at best and they had miles to go to convince critics that they were not aiming for a very dystopian interpretation of the concept. They failed spectacularly on the PR side. Probably enough to make their own engineers lose hope regarding both ethics and executive management.

&gt; I actually thought facebook was doing a ok job with oculus until the whole &#x27;metaverse&#x27; social push happendSpending billions of dollars on a subpar MMO game when better ones cost tens of millions at most to make - is bad?

&gt; I actually thought facebook was doing a ok job with oculus until the whole &#x27;metaverse&#x27; social push happendthe only good that they were doing was decent hardware at a decent price...

I actually thought facebook was doing a ok job with oculus until the whole &#x27;metaverse&#x27; social push happendit feels like the people invovled are serverly deteacted on what people want out of VR in generalit&#x27;s hard for me to imagine someone like carmack prefering to work in a envinronment like that (tearing down corp&#x2F;product walls) vs building his own team and trying to solve technical challenges

As grateful as I am for his contribution to VR, I can&#x27;t wait.He&#x27;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&#x27;t want to listen to him, why bother.

He was talking about working on AI the other day. Artificial general intelligence &quot;or die&quot; type of challenge taking.Guess he&#x27;s getting full time busy with that.

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.

I know the whole Oculus &#x2F; 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&#x27;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 &quot;wow, this it&#x27;s the future&quot;.Plus PCVR (something I feel meta lately doesn&#x27;t push as harder as they should) with the quest it&#x27;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 &quot;This device it&#x27;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&quot; to have people don&#x27;t over hype their expectations... while Mark and the official presentation was using pre-render avatars with legs for a feature that didn&#x27;t exist.

He was wholey un-corporate. So refreshing and real.Really shows what that brings to a corporate shitshow that is Meta.

Were they? I stopped watching after not being able to bear the stuttering graphics anymore.

His unscripted talks were amazing. Everytime I watched them I was thinking &quot;ok, the official Meta announcements are corny, but there is still someone that still cares about what is the actual end result;&quot; that&#x27;s why I was still semi-positive about Meta.Well, I guess not anymore.

He didn&#x27;t have much of a role anyways. His title was &quot;consulting CTO&quot;. He has primarily been running his own startup for a while now.

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.

Whatsapp&#x27;s developer had a similar frustration. Why are they selling to big companies and expect to have complete control? They aren&#x27;t being realistic. Big companies are going to do what they feel is best for them not the the other way around. There&#x27;s nothing new about that. I guess it&#x27;s too hard to reject the big payday.

I&#x27;m going to guess that there was an earnout that expired.

I would have been stunned if they had listened to someone wise and decent. They listen to quarterly reports I guess?

I think it depends on organization. In some good ones, politics and engineering align well. In most, they don&#x27;t.

That can be true, it&#x27;s also definitely what people say at a failing org that has become bureaucratic and political and doesn&#x27;t value technical skill. I have seen this first hand. There&#x27;s such thing as an asshole that nobody can work with of course. But overall it&#x27;s a red flag when accomplished people leave an org because &quot;it&#x27;s not for everyone&quot;.

Success in the corporate world requires more than technical prowess. One of those things is influence. It&#x27;s not for everyone.

He was Bethesda and Oculus. He isn’t Meta.Meta doesn’t seem to be able to do anything at all. At Facebook it was an unrivaled (yet amoral) champion of social media, but it doesn’t even seem like that now

The bigger the ship the smaller your rudder is.

Whoever those others are…they are irrelevant.

The man went from making the fastest 3D games ever to grace silicon to literally launching rockets. He&#x27;s been the fastest nerd alive, and Meta couldn&#x27;t even give him legs (figuratively and literally [1])[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;ouq5yyzSiAw?t=395" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;ouq5yyzSiAw?t=395</a>

How many people that ignorant actually work there though? Maybe there really is more dead weight than we thought..

If so, then they missed the games that used id Tech 4 and id Tech 5 (almost impossible given the success of Doom 3), and how Carmack continued to invent truly unthinkable performance and fidelity enhancements to real time 3D graphics until the day he left for Occulus.Then at Occulus he translated that engineering talent into a ruthless attack on latency and other issues with VR at the time. He was even working on this before he left.Anyone who has watched one of his QuakeCon Keynotes in the past 20 years knows just how much raw talent Carmack has as an engineer. Most of them are on YouTube, you should check them out.

I wonder how many people don&#x27;t value his opinion because (they assume) Carmack can&#x27;t solve LeetCode as well as they can.

Are you sure you don&#x27;t mean a &quot;Gen-X&#x27;er&quot; that hasn&#x27;t been relevant since he stole Apple ][s with thermite and vasoline? ;)

He might be considered by others as &quot;boomer&quot; that hasn&#x27;t been relevant &quot;since Quake III&quot;

I interpret this as strong circumstantial evidence that companies who start out as engineering centric and claims to be meritocratic eventually deteriorate into good ole nepotistic power play and a sea of bureaucracy. It’s quite entertaining to observe even John Carmack go through this very relatable frustration.

&gt; 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.

Is this a classic middle management malaise where everyone gets paid so well they don’t want to stir the pot? The bureaucracy and protection of today’s money cows which only clouds them from seeing tomorrow’s cows that will rescue them from certain obscurity?The Clayton M Christensen solution to big companies ignoring obvious problems is to have isolated small teams “infrapreneurship” who aren’t under the pressures of the larger org. With Meta’s push towards VR it’s obvious Oculus’s purpose is now Meta’s purpose. And all the downside that comes with such a thing.

&gt; FB culture is way too positive and happyoh wow.. never thought they could be happy at FB

I joined back in 2014 and left this year.I feel like I got to enjoy a couple of years before the company started to lose its nimbleness. Feedback groups used to get responses from the people that actually built the things instead of contractors whose primary function is feedback group triage. Sometimes you could actually have an impact by giving feedback, and you could see others having those impacts as well.When I left, it seemed like whatever wasn&#x27;t planned for upfront at the planning meetings for each half just won&#x27;t happen. Around 2018 I came to a team with a small feature request that I was happy to take on myself as long as they&#x27;d provide code review. I was told if I&#x27;d come to them a month ago they might&#x27;ve been able to do it, but now I&#x27;d need to wait until planning for the next half.I think Portal is a perfect example of how slow to adapt the company has become. It&#x27;s a fantastic video conferencing device, certainly the best at its price point. We happened to enter the pandemic with this device already available for sale, but we completely failed to capitalize on it. Zoom become the dominant video conferencing service pretty quickly. We failed to roll out Zoom support until October of 2020, when everyone had already established their video conferencing routines and were less likely to see the benefit of a dedicated device.Portal ended up failing so hard as a consumer product that it got transferred over to the Workplace division.I&#x27;d argued internally that at the very least we should allow sideloading of apps. Portal is just Android. People could run their videoconferencing application of choice, as well as any other apps. That would make the Portal more competitive versus an Android tablet, which all have okay videoconferencing as well as the whole world of Android apps.The Portal camera is fisheye so we&#x27;d need to modify Android to let regular apps pull a normal image using the Android camera APIs, but that&#x27;s totally doable.In the distant past these kinds of requests would&#x27;ve at least gotten engagement from people working on the product. In 2020, they got a chipper response from a contractor who I guess filed them in a feature requests tool where they went to die. Oh, the contractor also would provide directions on how to use the web browser in lieu of apps. Like the first iPhone.

It sounds as if the company itself does not have a &#x27;dislike&#x27; button.

I&#x27;ve heard that before about Facebook, that there&#x27;s a taboo against &quot;cynicism&quot;.But sometimes lack of cynicism can be disastrous. I&#x27;m reminded of a story, recounted in Francis Spufford&#x27;s &quot;Red Plenty&quot;, of Leonid Kantorovich who invented linear programming, and wrote a letter to Stalin politely suggesting he was doing economics wrong, he should do things his way instead. At the time Stalin was in his paranoid phase and had a tendency to murder anyone he noticed. Luckily for Kantorovich, a much more cynical bureaucrat intercepted the letter before Stalin could read it, and didn&#x27;t pass it on.When things are unacceptably bad, it&#x27;s actually necessary to realize things are unacceptably bad, and not pretend that there&#x27;s always a nice and right way out of it.People who suppress their own doubts force others to carry their doubts for them.

That is a problem in every company to be honest. And bigger problem as it gets bigger

He isn&#x27;t alone.A core problem is that FB culture is way too positive and happy, and hard criticism is received poorly. The politics to get anything done if your name isn&#x27;t Mark is borderline impossible.I left a year ago, and I&#x27;ve become beyond happy.

Meta itself only exists because of poor direction. It is an aberration of humanity. If good counsel and advice were important to Meta, it would shut down on itself because its very existence is an offence to common sense.

I don&#x27;t work at Meta, but I assume that, like any other bureaucracyIt&#x27;s a large company, with home-grown political feifdoms - and technical merits for ideas aren&#x27;t good enough to get things your way. Even if he is a big cheese in the world of actually knowing things, that doesn&#x27;t really matter to his executive peers.You need to both know things, and be very good at politicking to be successful.

This would surprise nobody who has any experience behind the FB curtain.

Your reference to people being a Cassandra inside Facebook is extra funny considering they made CassandraDB.

Facebook leans into making everyone feel like their opinions matters: &quot;Nothing at Facebook is someone else&#x27;s problem&quot;. But not everyone can be right, so of course you end up with people being ignored and feeling shirty.At other companies I&#x27;ve worked at the norm is that the rank and file feel powerless, and it doesn&#x27;t even occur to them to offer their opinion.

This is why there are so many leaks from Facebook. My sister is a reporter and she says that people leak when they feel they can&#x27;t influence the decision of the org, that they are a Cassandra who is being ignored by the organization. That there is so much leaking from Facebook- much of it from seemingly senior and highly respected people- suggests major problems in the decision making process there.

Where did this come from? This quote only resolves to this post.Edit: A little more searching and I found the full memo<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;meta-john-carmack-scathing-exit-memo-derides-bureaucracy-2022-12" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;meta-john-carmack-scathing-e...</a>

I think we can only speculate about reasons, so everybody is gonna project. Maybe the Facebook culture is uniquely bad. Maybe Carmack isn&#x27;t an effective leader. Maybe it&#x27;s just how large corporations work. Maybe he was dealt a bad hand.Meanwhile, I admire that he had the guts to see the issue, say it out loud in a self-critical way, and call it quits. Most people don&#x27;t.

His internal badge (ie. goodbye) post. This is definitely not in the article.Edit: The article has a link to some other paywalled link that may contain the full contents of the note. I don&#x27;t have a subscription so I can&#x27;t tell but the quote is real at least.

Where is that quotation from? I don&#x27;t see that in the linked article.

I want to write about this topic in more depth, but in a nutshell I found that the more innovative and valuable your idea is, the harder it is to sell (because it&#x27;s very value comes from the fact that it&#x27;s a distance from bow people are thinking today)People are busy and attention is scarce so knowing how to genuinely push and sell your idea in such environments is a rare ability and one that needs curation.You&#x27;ll find that people who rise are ones who can do this.

If you want the boring answer: Money and clout.The slightly less boring answer: some people don&#x27;t necessarily have the audience&#x27;s best interests at heart. Sometimes not even the company&#x27;s best interests. To use a slightly less heinous example than some of the obviously malicious backstabbing: maybe you do know that Idea B is more efficient, but Idea A was yours, and it looks great on a resume to say that you achitected Idea A, that is being used in production (even if it made the company less money and the product worse off). You&#x27;re gonna leave the company in 3 years anyway, so why care about some efficiency? Why even care if 6 years down the line someone else comes in and cleans up the code and ends up using Idea B in the end? You got your value out of it.Slghtly less boring answer 2: people aren&#x27;t perfect. And attach to the smallest fixations. So they fight not because the idea is bad but because their goal is to spite that particular person. You just need to be more discrete about it than back in grade school. This example was a person, but it can be extended to a group, a company, even an idealogy as a whole. Be it in zealous defense or in spite of, it has a similar effect on productivity.

&gt; Certainly Carmack has the industry respect to be taken seriously. Why wasn’t he?I wonder if his schedule played some part. He worked there for one day a week. I could see it being really difficult to understand his vision if you have to wait 7 days to ask a follow-up*, for example. And it&#x27;s gotta be close to impossible to move the needle on existing culture if you&#x27;re barely around.* and while you wait there are plenty of other people around to ask instead

I have a genuine question about what to do when one finds oneself in this type of position and one is surrounded by people who seemingly do give a damn (and one isn&#x27;t compelled to just give up and leave).In my experience, the software industry, in it’s aggressive desire to be egalitarian, has an authority problem. I have encountered the “I told you so one year ago but we just had to learn the hard way didn&#x27;t we” situation more times than it seems efficient. I am not unaware that I may be selectively remembering things and I’m not so prideful to ignore that I’ve also made calls that turn out to need adjusting down the road… but it baffles me why people put in positions of power and leadership are so often ignored almost on the whim of some well meaning but misguided other party. Certainly Carmack has the industry respect to be taken seriously. Why wasn’t he?

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;Lmu9g" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;Lmu9g</a>

After some passages were published, he put up the full text: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;permalink.php?story_fbid=pfbid0iPixEvPJQGzNa6t2x6HUL5TYqfmKGqSgfkBg6QaTyHF5frXQi7eLGxC7uPQv5U5jl&amp;id=100006735798590" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;permalink.php?story_fbid=pfbid0iPix...</a>

Where are you quoting this from? A link would be nice, I don&#x27;t see this in the article.

Yeah. I feel like this a lot. I don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;s a bias of some kind but it feels right.I suppose it&#x27;s selection bias. I don&#x27;t know how to market, but apparently the marketing people do because we have customers. I do know about my corner of the system though, and when my advice is ignored it usually turns out I was right in the end.

It&#x27;s hard to walk this line.I think some people are forthright and outspoken, but a long game persuasion might be the best strategy sometimes.I remember Linus Torvalds commenting on systemd, and accepting the work with upstanding neutrality (I wished he had rejected the binary log files)&quot;I don&#x27;t actually have any particularly strong opinions on systemd itself. I&#x27;ve had issues with some of the core developers that I think are much too cavalier about bugs and compatibility, and I think some of the design details are insane (I dislike the binary logs, for example), but those are details, not big issues.&quot;

&gt; If John fucking Carmack cannot move the bureaucracy this wayMy read is its not so much the bureaucracy of project managers or paperwork as it is junior executives trying to &#x27;leave their mark&#x27;, defend their turf, etc.

I&#x27;d suggest you get off the carmack idol worshipping horse. Just because he failed doesn&#x27;t invalidate your thoughts and opinions.

Carmack is famous externally, especially among a generation that grew up with Doom&#x2F;Quake. But it isn&#x27;t like Facebook employs a bunch of ordinary engineers and then Carmack. There are a lot of people with extraordinarily impressive resumes and a long history of massive technical success there. It is not a surprise to me that it didn&#x27;t just become the &quot;do what Carmack says&quot; show when he joined. Consensus-building becomes even harder at larger institutions.

What makes you think Carmack is especially persuasive? Often, those with the best technical chops are the least persuasive and it seems misguided to think that the reason you can&#x27;t persuade is because you are lacking technically.

Ironically I felt reassured reading this. &quot;[...] I&#x27;m evidently not persuasive enough. A good fraction of the things I complain about eventually turn my way after [...] evidence piles up&quot; especially resonates with me. While I rationally understand it&#x27;s just corporate bureaucracy &#x2F; politics, sometimes I still wonder if I were just a bit more capable I&#x27;d be more persuasive.If John fucking Carmack cannot move the bureaucracy this way, then it&#x27;s folly for me to try the same. I should accept that we&#x27;re playing checkers not chess.

His writings definitely show a lot of humility.

Perhaps he hated bureaucrats meddling with engineering and user experience.Maybe he’s condescending in a team of bright people, and sees the world as him and then everyone lesser?It’s hard to say what blend of reasons, other than what he explains.

Seems like Meta is not a good fit for John Carmack.

&gt;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.He worked for an Ad company that voraciously mined through their user&#x27;s data. Unless he was able to find new ways to monetize their users or bypass iOS&#x27;s opt in app tracking, I see no reason why they would even care.

I&#x27;m as shocked as you are. What a wasted opportunity by petty people with big egos. And I paid for it literally. I bought a Oculus set and stopped using soon after. What a disappointment. I wanted to support the technology, but my good will was squandered. At least I feel vindicated by every thing John Carmack says because I thought some similar things.

I dunno man. I think I&#x27;m a pretty good dev, but if John Carmack told me I was wrong about a technical issue&#x2F;overall technical direction I&#x27;d give him some serious consideration. The only time I can recall disagreeing with him was a few years ago when he said people who want better gaming on Linux should focus on improving Wine instead of native support. And it turns out he was largely correct there and I was wrong, if Valve&#x27;s success with Proton is any indication.

That saying about how teenagers and twenty year old think they&#x27;re immortal? There&#x27;s some variant of that for programmers. That failure mode is something that happens to other people, to suckers, so I don&#x27;t have to change direction because some guy who&#x27;s going grey at the temples tells me I&#x27;m walking toward a cliff.I&#x27;ve been in places where my job became a bit of a cleaner, for things that shouldn&#x27;t have needed to be cleaned in the first place. When I realize that&#x27;s what I&#x27;m doing - when it&#x27;s most or all of what I&#x27;m doing - I leave. Sounds like John might have similar boundaries, and found himself standing at the edge of one.I&#x27;d really like to see him try his own thing again, and either not sell it this time or be quite a bit more precious about what he&#x27;s willing to part with and for how many zeroes.

Damn this rings home.(Im not comparing my skillset to Carmack, im my eyes hes a god of programming and has an insanely deep skillset and knowledge about so much software related)Sometimes i feel the same, a new feature is requested and i directly see this is an anti-feature, or just overall a bad decision. I voice my concern, but the client request goes first.Next up the feature is poorly implemented, usually &quot;just like the client wanted it&quot; without any bigger design. Testing is barely done, and finally it goes to prod. Next is a 3 month period of bugfixes, and ultimately this one feature can take up 60-70% of a devs time.Then the process repeats.

It&#x27;s only stunning because programmers view him as a god, when in reality, he is a just a fallible human being. Just goes to show even programmers are susceptible to idolism.The signs were all there. He entered a den where he doesn&#x27;t hold founder status anymore, and that the value of his contributions to the company does not hold as much weight.

Someone on Reddit coined the term &#x27;institutional inertia&#x27;, which probably applies here too.

Carmack is an absolute genius and it would be madness to disregard anything he&#x27;s spent any significant amount of time thinking about.But let&#x27;s be real, he isn&#x27;t Tim Sweeny or Gabe Newell. As smart he is, I don&#x27;t think he is even top 3 in the best business decision makers of his specific field of first person shooter game developers. His track record is that using his tremendous skill he caught one of the biggest waves, and he&#x27;s been riding that out and catching smaller waves ever since. I don&#x27;t even think he didn&#x27;t see the larger subsequent waves that Sweeney and Newell saw, I think he just wasn&#x27;t interested in them.Was he interested in catching big waves for Facebook, or was he interested in pursuing his specific vision?

&gt;I have plenty of examples across multiple top-tier companies, of senior leadership who were smart, thoughtful, effective... and still reasonable and compassionate.some hide it well, some haven&#x27;t met a cutthroat enough politician&#x2F;executive. Some may be smart or lucky enough to completely avoid the scene altogether and tend to their own farm peacefully. And then maybe 2 remaining groups are truly in sync and altruistic and overall seem to be interested in the betterment of their audience than profits.I wouldn&#x27;t bet on Meta being in the latter category tho. I hope carmack enjoys his farm, he&#x27;s definitely earned it.&gt;I think it&#x27;s simply that it&#x27;s tough to move people, plain as that.can&#x27;t make a horse drink. In this case, it&#x27;s probably more like you can&#x27;t even lead the horse to water to begin with.That&#x27;s why culture fit is such a strong factor in success. you can&#x27;t spend all day fighting and expect reasonable progress to be made.

For every example of smart, thoughtful, effective senior leadership there are 10 or 100 of the opposite sort. Most corporations are a living proof of Peter&#x27;s principle, where senior management is a country club of old* people covering each other&#x27;s incompetence.
* It is not about ageism, but about people that are in their 5 years before retirement and have zero motivation to do any work, keep skills in shape or give a damn. I worked with a lot of people that were more than decent in their careers, but dropped the ball completely in the last 5 to 10 years before retirement with huge negative impact for their employers. How can this happen? In big companies the inertia covers for these people.

&gt; 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.This doesn&#x27;t actually surprise me in the least bit, and that&#x27;s not a criticism of either FB&#x2F;Meta or Carmack. It&#x27;s simply that after a couple of decades in industry, I now see that effective organizational leaders are exceedingly rare, and I&#x27;ve seen now many super-experts --legends in their fields-- join big companies and not find their footing.I also don&#x27;t really buy the &quot;you gotta be good at cutthroat politics.&quot; I have plenty of examples across multiple top-tier companies, of senior leadership who were smart, thoughtful, effective... and still reasonable and compassionate.I think it&#x27;s simply that it&#x27;s tough to move people, plain as that. And in Carmack&#x27;s case, I will wager that his expertise and track record were not enough to get everyone to drop what they&#x27;re doing and follow his lead. After all, there are many other legends at Meta too. And, there&#x27;s an abundance of good ideas all fighting for limited mindshare and limited ability to act.

yeah if Carmack quits on you it&#x27;s a political problem and not a tech problem.

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

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&#x27;s.  Very different from task level involvement but friction there should be separate from effectiveness at the CTO&#x27;s desk level (&amp; I have to guess Boz is the one who&#x27;s quality of life got improved more than specific engineering teams)

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&#x27;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&#x27;s a reason the folk wisdom tells you to never meet your heroes. When you do, you painfully realize that the stories didn&#x27;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.

Why was the Oculus Go considered a failure?

Yeah well, you&#x27;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 &quot;prove something wrong with data&quot; it&#x27;s more that they&#x27;re &quot;taking some data and interpret in a way that fits their standpoint&quot;.Carmack has proven enough times in the past that he&#x27;s able to deliver, that he can push technology, knows what&#x27;s possible and what isn&#x27;t, and can wrap up a product. &quot;Wading into fields he has no experience in&quot; sounds pretty unlikely for VR given his past work. And I wouldn&#x27;t consider the Oculus Go a failure, more like ahead of it&#x27;s time and released too early. A prototype of the quest. But I guess now it&#x27;s easy to claim everything that&#x27;s bad about the go was Carmack&#x27;s work and everything good about the quest and quest 2 was someone else&#x27;s.

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

It&#x27;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&#x27;s effectively-infinite resources in the exact ways that he wanted. It&#x27;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.

I&#x27;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 &quot;Steve Jobs of coding&quot; (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&#x27;s also obviously not a very good politician&#x2F;sellperson (he can&#x27;t sell what he hasn&#x27;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&#x27;t.The evidence pile up more against FB&#x2F;Meta management than against Carmack, moreover I think it&#x27;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&#x27;t, so maybe Linus was simply right.

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.

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 &quot;can we ship&quot; and &quot;does it make money&quot;. 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 &quot;being right&quot; can mean many different things to people. Data doesn&#x27;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.

I don&#x27;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&#x27;re an industry of weak communicators, and it is hurting all of our careers.

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 &quot;I don&#x27;t care, because I still believe I&#x27;m right from an ideological background&quot;. He would devalue people, there expertise, there experience, and there thoughts because &quot;I&#x27;m John Carmack&quot;. 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 &quot;If only Meta would let Carmack do what he wants we&#x27;d see his ideal VR experience and it would be amazing&quot;. You already saw it. It was Oculus Go, and by every metric is was a commercial, financial, and technical, disaster.

”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&#x27;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.

John Carmack Leaves Meta