John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

> they also got me reported to HR by the manager of the XROS effort for supposedly making his team members feel bad

This is madness. The safe space culture has really gone too far.

it is madness, you would be surprised how many ppl take things too serious. been there, had talk with HR cause i've said that the solution is mediocre and we have to do something better than that.

Something tells me that if we heard the other side of the story it might hit different. There's a lot of wiggle room in what "making his team members feel bad" could mean, and I would be surprised if constructively voiced criticism would have gotten someone written up.

I'll offer a different interpretation:

If a professional can't give critical feedback in a professional setting without being rude or belittling others, then they need to improve their communication skills.

People have been getting mad at being made to feel bad at work for much longer than “safe space culture” has existed. If someone or some team had more power than you at an organization you for sure will get reprimanded for making them feel bad.

Reading between the lines, it sounds like he got reported for giving a lot of what might kindly be described as unsolicited advice. The guy left Meta ages ago, but he apparently still can't let this one go.

If you're in the middle of trying to write a new operating system, then it's probably not helpful to have John Carmack standing over you repeatedly telling you that you shouldn't be doing it. In this case Carmack gets the last laugh. Then again, it is easy to get the last laugh by predicting that a project will fail, given that most projects do.

From what you know of Carmack, does "can't give critical feedback in a professional setting without being rude or belittling others" sound like him to you? It does not to me, though granted maybe he's different in his non public persona than what you can see in presentations and talks.

This.

Being "reported to HR" doesn't mean "almost got fired". It likely meant a meeting where someone explained "hey, the way you communicated that caused some upset, let's discuss better ways to handle that situation next time." Very often in larger companies, complaints about things like "this bigwig from this other group jumped all over us" are automatically sent through HR because HR has staff whose job just is resolving conflicts between people and keeping things peaceful.

With my experience of being written up for constructive criticism the reasoning was that I didn’t give constructive criticism to others and they felt singled out. I only give such criticism in private so of course they were not there to see the others. Apparently that wasn’t a sufficient explanation.

You've concluded this from a single, brief, throwaway line? Any madness you perceive about this situation has been fabricated by you, based on the details we have.

Having worked in the valley, I've seen what critical feedback meant in many companies there, and it removes all usefulness of the info because there is a ceiling of what is socially acceptable to say; therefore, you can't know how bad or urgent things are.

Everything is ASAP. They are super excited about everything. And nothing you do is wrong, it just could be improved or they like it but don't love it.

You don't know if something is important, basically.

Just like Louis CK said, "if you used 'amazing' on chicken nuggets, what are you going to say when your first child is born?". But in reverse.

Personally, I'd rather work with someone who would tell me my work is terrible if it is.

In Germany, you can't even legally say somebody did a bad job at your company in a recommendation letter. Companies created a whole subtext to workaround that, it's crazy.

Some things are just bad. You should be able to say it is. Not by saying it could be better. Not by using euphemism. It's just something that needs to go to the trash.

In fact, I don't trust people who can't receive this information, even if not packaged with tact (which you should attempt to, but life happens). If you can't handle people not being perfectly polite every time, I can't help but feel I won't be able to count on you when things get hard.

That must be the French in me talking.

A meeting with HR is not madness. No one got maimed or died, or even lost work, seemingly. Some people exchanged words.

Cool off.

> unsolicited advice

He was the CTO of Oculus. Surely it is appropriate for the CTO to give advice on any big technical decisions, if not outright have veto power.

Clearly he didn't have veto power on the project he's talking about.

This is not that though. This is just developers being unable to handle constructive criticism, and when they can't win the argument on merits, went for the HR option. It happens.

I've had it happen to me too, but my response was to resign on the spot (I was already not satisfied with the company).

The "toxic behaviour" I had done? I reverted a commit on the master branch that didn't compile, and sent a slack to the Dev who had committed it saying "hi! There appears to have been a mistake in your latest commit, could you please check it out and fix it? I've reverted it in the meantime since I need to deploy this other feature"

The dev responded by force pushing the code that did not compile to master and contacted HR.

I decided there was greener grass on other pastures. I was right.

When I started breaking the build would end up with the person who did it having to wear the dunce hat for the day. This was before git so there are now fewer excuses for breaking the build today.

> In Germany, you can't even legally say somebody did a bad job at your company in a recommendation letter. Companies created a whole subtext to workaround that, it's crazy.

I don't think it's just about legality. Whether the recommendation letter is included in the application is at the distinction of the applicant. When you want it to reach the next company, you must write is so, that the former employee considers it to be a good recommendation.

> If you're in the middle of trying to write a new operating system, then it's probably not helpful to have John Carmack standing over you repeatedly telling you that you shouldn't be doing it. In this case Carmack gets the last laugh. Then again, it is easy to get the last laugh by predicting that a project will fail, given that most projects do.

I mean, if you're working on a project that is likely to fail, wouldn't it be nice if someone gave you cover to stop working on it, and then you could figure out something else to do that might not fail? Can't get any impact if your OS will never ship.

I am with you on this. Worked in our Dublin office was so refreshing to have straight up communication vs whatever the song and dance we do here in US.

Carmack says he can't post the actual discussion, but clearly you have access to it - can you post it?

I'd just quote Mourinho / Carlsen. "If I say anything I'm in big trouble".

Even if that didn't violate NDAs & etc, that would be super rude. You realize that, right?

FWIW, it can also mean a meeting where HR says to the complainer: "Are you good, dude? Why are you complaining about this? This is perfectly normal workplace behavior. Stop wasting our time."

It’s also super rude to make claims as to what occurred and why in any situation you yourself were not privy to or involved in but I don’t see you rushing in with the same vigour to point that out.

> It’s also super rude to make claims as to what occurred and why in any situation you yourself were not privy to or involved in...

Do you know that that's what's going on here?

Yes. Seems pretty clear from the post to me that they are making assumptions based on a similar event in their past, not that they were involved first hand in this event.

It is, as Portuguese it surprised me a lot.

First of all, in southern countries we hardly do recommendation letters, if we do they usually ended up being written by ourselves and if the company agrees with the content, it gets signed.

Exactly because of this, you are supposed to give referrals that then talk whatever they feel like about the experience working with you was all about.

Having a whole legal process for recommendation letters, that have created a whole industry of hidden language that looks good on the surface but tells exactly otherwise, was a surprise to me.

https://www.betriebsrat.de/news/arbeitnehmer/achtung-arbeits...

https://www.zeugnisprofi.com/wissen/arbeitszeugnis-geheimcod...

https://www.orizon.de/de/karriereratgeber/arbeitszeugnis-ver...

Just some examples, there are lawyers that analyse recommendation letters as one of their services.

>> Do you know that that's what's going on here?

> Yes. Seems pretty clear from the post to me that they are making assumptions...

So you don't know what's going on; you're assuming. Cool.

The people working on it may not have agreed that it was likely to fail.

But in any case, almost all interesting projects are likely to fail. Of course it is objectively unlikely that a project to write a new OS will succeed. I expect the people working on it were aware of that.

The only reason you want me to "cool off", is because you feel bad just interacting with somebody expressing a polite, strong opinion. Online. On the other side of the world. With text.

This is exactly the madness I'm talking about.

Case in point.

It got mentioned for a reason. And obviously escalating with HR is a big deal as it comes with career risks for the person you are reporting. Risking someone else's career should be a last resort but seems to be more commonly a knee-jerk reaction with HR becoming weaponised.

The drawback of this is you lose good talent and keep rent-seekers instead.

When a veteran tells you something and is passionate about it, maybe it is worth listening or at least dealing with internally. At the end, he left anyway even if the project didn't fail and Meta remains wealthy but largely mediocre in terms of the products it delivers while relying heavily on startup acquisition and large spending. Pretty sure most people who work there only do so for premium rent-seeking.

None of it surprising if this is a signal of how they operate.

Yes, of course. The point of my heavy-handed post was to try to find out what is actually going on here. Does this person have any insider info? Or are they (as many are in the discussion, and as I suspect is the case here too - but I am going only on the balance of probabilities!) just using this as an opportunity to relate this to their own grievances, so they can discuss those?

We've only got one side of this particular story, we don't know what happened from the other person's point of view, we don't know what form this HR complaint took - or any of the other details. We can bet, just as I did in my last paragraph, but in my view the odds are more questionable and the topic more likely end up as unproductive venting. Any good comments will get lost.

Still, it's also true that the link is just there as a starting point for discussion, and the discussion can take any forms that the readership would find interesting.

No, your comment was potent nonsense. It raises no feelings in me other than contempt towards you personally.

And me saying cool off is madness? You must live in a mad, mad world. Good luck going forward.

Has HR been weaponized if the result was just a chat

The result does not change the intent.

You don't know the intent and are going by partial information.

All you have is the result but you infer a whole lot so it fits your framing.

Someone called HR, HR met with the people and they chatted. That is all you have.

Sometimes you have to let people fail, even though you can see it coming. It sounds like Carmack was sticking his nose in a project that wasn’t under his purview and he dug his heels in a bit too much when he should have just let it fail.

All the FAANG do dumb shit all the time and waste huge sums of money, if you work at a FAANG the best thing you can do is stay in your lane and don’t do dumb shit — eventually it will shake out.

I have been bullied around by L7s (as a L5) sticking their nose in things, and the best thing you can do is clearly articulate what you are doing and why, and that you understand their feedback. Turns out the L7 got canned — partially due to their bullying — and I got promoted for executing and being a supportive teammate, so things worked out in the end.

> The people working on it may not have agreed that it was likely to fail.

They probably didn't agree, but the claim was that it wasn't helpful. being helpful and telling people what they want to hear aren't the same thing. If you're working on a destined to fail project, the most helpful thing to hear would be some way to change its destiny, the next most helpful thing to hear would be a call to stop doing it.

Besides all that, Facebook is probably one of the worst places to develop a new general purpose OS. The review system is built around rewarding impact, which means a long term project with no early deliverables sets up the staff to get poor reviews, which limits staffing. The company also has not built the kind of trust in products, sdks, etc that would make using a new OS seem like a good idea to potential users, or to encourage developers to make applications available for it, or to encourage companies to use it in their products. It would have to be so amazingly better than the marketplace of OSes that it made up for the lack of software for it and become a target of new software.

A special purpose OS is different. The development process is usually not as long, the requirements tend to be pretty narrow, and the target would likely be something in house. It might still not be a good idea, there's lots of off the shelf options to look at and they are likely good enough in many to most cases.

> So you don't know what's going on; you're assuming. Cool.

Incorrect. Their post makes it clear they were not involved in their own words. It's called reading comprehension.

> It's called reading comprehension.

Right back at you.

Although I think JC is right in this case, I'm not convinced that he had any kind of insight that wouldn't have already been obvious to the OS experts hired on the team. Writing a new OS is going to be really difficult? No shit!

I guess if he'd been on the Apollo program he'd be the guy telling all the experts that landing humans safely on the moon was going to be quite hard. Thanks John. We'll bear that in mind.

Yes, except I’ve already displayed I’m capable of it whilst you have displayed only the opposite.