Carmack quits Meta, brands it inefficient and unprepared for competition Legendary developer John Carmack has quit his role as a consultant to Meta, where he worked as an executive consultant on its Oculus virtual reality hardware. Carmack joined Oculus as its chief technology officer in 2013 – the year before it was acquired by Facebook – and detailed his departure in a Facebook post that …
I'm a techie who's starting to move more into management and away from the coal face of coding, building & fixing things.
If you think your skills of problem solving and logical reasoning are going to see you do well iin management then think again. Management is all about the three Ps: People, Politics & Pride. Not an ounce of logic or common sense in sight.
If you think management decisions that have directly affected you are stupid, wait 'till you see the shitshow of senior management meetings and be grateful for all the hardwork your current line managers puts in shielding you from the crap.
From what I've seen of manglement
Manglement is all about stamping down on the minions below you, back stabbing the manglers at your level and arse kissing the mangler above you.
And since I cant do any of the above.... guess I'm stuck at the level of irreplacable* technical expert
*hint for new to the world of IT/engineering/anything really.... never be irreplacable, if you cant be replaced , you'll never get promoted
> hint for new to the world of IT/engineering/anything really.... never be irreplacable, if you cant be replaced , you'll never get promoted.
Seems some spurious text sneaked into the sentence, it should read
hint for new to the world of IT/engineering/anything really.... you'll never get promoted
Career stage matters. At first it's all about creating a career-defining product that's better than anything else out there. As time wears on they want out and have too much stock granted. Fuel the tech debt and burnout the staff. Fire half your team if it will bump up the stock price for a moment or pay for a bonus.
...that's why they say "just getting something done is an achievement"!
TBH - I'm not sure Facebook was the right company to buy Oculus. Carmack took the money anyway, though. Credit to him for staying and trying at least - most founders would have moved on a year later...
> I'm not sure Facebook was the right company to buy Oculus. Carmack took the money anyway, though.
It wasn't Carmack's decision. Carmack was only the Chief Technology Officer at Occulus, he wasn't its founder, and he didn't run the company. The founder was Palmer Luckey.
EDIT: Carmack joined Occulus early on, and his presentations and tech demos probably got more public attention than Luckey, so I can see why you might have the impression he was the founder / CEO.
He wrote that some of those issues were 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."
So you're saying there's an Occulus Rift with management?
For decades, it's been almost a law of Silicon Valley to locate the smart people and follow what are doing. When the smart people start to converge at a single company, expect great things. When smart people move away from a company, expect it to flounder.
Carmack is definitely one of the smart people, and his leaving Meta / Facebook / whatever tells a story way beyond his words.
But the last time I worked in a resource-constrained IT organization was.. NEVER.
I've only seen that those actual collaborations with far fewer resources and shoestring budget have the most and best content (in the web space).
Those with no resource constraints and funded-out-the-arse have tons of engineering discipline and code and Agile practices applied, and formal design process with expensive third parties, and literally ZERO content. It's all about design, the design of NOTHING.
We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources
That's a problem that happens when businesses and particularly tech startups take off. The money comes pouring in the door and there is no reason not to use that money to expand. The result is a ridiculous number of people who end up hindering rather than helping them get product out the door. Perhaps Musk was right with Twitter and the first thing to do is dramatically reduce the size of the workforce.
Now would be the time to create a new, compelling, good first person shooter with nice single player action, multiplayer battles, no loot-box/shop nonsense.
He could use his AI knowledge to create some bad ass enemies, and maybe even optimized game flow with random elements, better render speeds etc.
Just a nice, once payed for, non online game.
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