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Topic Starter Topic: John Carmack resigns completely from Meta/Oculus

I'm the dude!
I'm the dude!
Joined: 04 Feb 2002
Posts: 12498
PostPosted: 12-16-2022 10:07 PM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


Quote:
John Carmack:

I resigned from my position as an executive consultant for VR with Meta. My internal post to the company got leaked to the press, but that just results in them picking a few choice bits out of it. Here is the full post, just as the internal employees saw it:
-------------
This is the end of my decade in VR.

I have mixed feelings.

Quest 2 is almost exactly what I wanted to see from the beginning – mobile hardware, inside out tracking, optional PC streaming, 4k (ish) screen, cost effective. Despite all the complaints I have about our software, millions of people are still getting value out of it. We have a good product. It is successful, and successful products make the world a better place. It all could have happened a bit faster and been going better if different decisions had been made, but we built something pretty close to The Right Thing.

The issue is our efficiency.

Some will ask why I care how the progress is happening, as long as it is happening?
If I am trying to sway others, I would say that an org that has only known inefficiency is ill prepared for the inevitable competition and/or belt tightening, but really, it is the more personal pain of seeing a 5% GPU utilization number in production. I am offended by it.

[edit: I was being overly poetic here, as several people have missed the intention. As a systems optimization person, I care deeply about efficiency. When you work hard at optimization for most of your life, seeing something that is grossly inefficient hurts your soul. I was likening observing our organization's performance to seeing a tragically low number on a profiling tool.]

We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort. There is no way to sugar coat this; I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy. Some may scoff and contend we are doing just fine, but others will laugh and say “Half? Ha! I’m at quarter efficiency!”

It has been a struggle for me. I have a voice at the highest levels here, so it feels like I should be able to move things, but I’m evidently not persuasive enough. A good fraction of the things I complain about eventually turn my way after a year or two passes and evidence piles up, but I have never been able to kill stupid things before they cause damage, or set a direction and have a team actually stick to it. I think my influence at the margins has been positive, but it has never been a prime mover.

This was admittedly self-inflicted – I could have moved to Menlo Park after the Oculus acquisition and tried to wage battles with generations of leadership, but I was busy programming, and I assumed I would hate it, be bad at it, and probably lose anyway.

Enough complaining. I wearied of the fight and have my own startup to run, but the fight is still winnable! VR can bring value to most of the people in the world, and no company is better positioned to do it than Meta. Maybe it actually is possible to get there by just plowing ahead with current practices, but there is plenty of room for improvement.

Make better decisions and fill your products with “Give a Damn”!


Fuck Zuckerberg/Meta anyway, and the Oculus buyout seemed so strange to pair with Facebook in the first place, but this certainly says something about how badly managed things must be at Meta if JC can't even get teams to work better on efficiency.

Oh well, Carmack is interested in working with general AI now anyway, so it'll be interesting to see how he applies his brain to something with a far greater outreach.



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Cool #9
Cool #9
Joined: 01 Dec 2000
Posts: 44131
PostPosted: 12-17-2022 12:30 AM           Profile   Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


A few things:
Carmack has been winding down on VR stuff at Meta for the past year or longer. Him moving away entirely is not a surprise at all.

Also, many of these complaints about Meta aren't Meta specific things. It's inherent to companies as big as that (almost 60,000 employees). Carmack talked a bit about this in his interview with Lex Fridman (a 5+ hrs podcast well worth listening to). I feel it's largely down to an incompatibility between a free creative mind who is used to doing his own thing in a relatively small company where his will is law and a huge company like Meta.

As for Meta (then still Facebook) buying Palmer Luckey's Oculus, Carmack also admitted that this gave them a lot of freedom. A lot of the non-technical work overhead was taken care of for them (business, marketing, etc) and having access to Meta's enormous wealth and other resources meant they had way less operational limits than without Meta's backing. The Meta takeover wasn't an entirely bad thing.




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Arrr?
Arrr?
Joined: 09 Feb 2001
Posts: 35460
PostPosted: 12-17-2022 01:31 PM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


obsidian wrote:
Oh well, Carmack is interested in working with general AI now anyway, so it'll be interesting to see how he applies his brain to something with a far greater outreach.

I'd much rather see him do this than continue working for Facebook. :up:




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Lead Pipe Mafia
Lead Pipe Mafia
Joined: 15 Oct 2007
Posts: 5943
PostPosted: 12-20-2022 04:34 AM           Profile   Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


That's how you get nightmare bots in real life Transient.




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Commander
Commander
Joined: 13 Jun 2014
Posts: 120
PostPosted: 01-20-2023 11:06 PM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


Total respect :arrow: "..it is the more personal pain of seeing a 5% GPU utilization number in production. I am offended by it. "




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