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

> my old internal posts... got me reported to HR by the manager of the XROS effort for supposedly making his team members feel bad

That jives with my sense that META is a mediocre company

I'm sure that kind of crap helped nudge JC out of there. He mentions (accurate and relevant) reasons why something is probably a bad idea, and the person in charge of doing it complains that JC brought up the critiques, rather than addressing the critiques themselves. What a pathetic, whiny thing to do.

Ugly people like to blame the mirrors.

It matters who you communicate concerns to. Something as fundamental as "I think that your team shouldn't even exist" should go to the team leads and their managers exclusively at first. Writing that to the entire affected team is counterproductive in any organization because it unnecessarily raises anxiety and reduces team productivity and focus. Comments like this from influential people can have big mental and physical health impacts on people.

If I was on that team I'd welcome the opportunity to tell John Carmac why he was wrong or if I agreed start looking for another project to work on.

When I was on nuclear submarines we'd call what you are advocating "keep us in the dark and feed us bullshit."

You've got to remember that context is critical with stuff like this.

There's nothing wrong with well-founded and thoughtful criticism. On the other hand, it is very easy for this to turn into personal attacks or bullying - even if it wasn't intended to be.

If you're not careful you'll end up with juniors copying the style and phrasing of less-carefully-worded messages of their tech demigod, and you end up with a huge hostile workplace behaviour cesspit.

It's the same reason why Linus Torvalds took a break to reflect on his communication style: no matter how strongly you feel about a topic, you can't let your emotions end up harming the community.

So yes, I can totally see poorly-worded critiques leading to HR complaints. Having to think twice about the impact of the things you write is an essential part of being at a high level in a company, you simply can't afford to be careless anymore.

It's of course impossible to conclude that this is what happened in this specific case without further details, but it definitely wouldn't be the first time something like this happened with a tech legend.

This entire situation looks very suspicious. Was Carmack even responsible for triaging research projects and allocating resources for them? If yes, then he should have fought that battle earlier. If no, then the best he could do is to refuse to use that OS in projects he controls.

It should be fine to give your opinion on efforts.

Not when this is his personal opinion he thought nothing should follow from.

"I think that your team shouldn't even exist" doesn't mean "I want your team to no longer exist.".

> Comments like this from influential people can have big mental and physical health impacts on people.

So what are we supposed to do? Just let waste continue? The entire point of engineering is to understand the tradeoffs of each decision and to be able to communicate them to others...

Maybe on a mediocre team. But that was the parent comment's point.

On well-functioning teams, product feedback shouldn't have to be filtered through layers of management. In fact, it would be dishonest to discuss something like this with managers while hiding it from the rest of the team.

Yeah it sounds to me here like the urge to reach for HR had less to do with Carmack and more to do with the overall culture at Meta.

This assumes that you would be sincerely listened to, which you wouldn't in a case like this. Higher ups in large organizations don't have the bandwidth to listen to everybody.

Your sub's officers also need to constantly be aware of what to communicate to whom and in which language. Your superiors certainly kept you in the dark about a ton of concerns that were on their plate because simply mentioning them to subordinates would have been too distracting.

Carmack had no direct say over research AFAIK.

But the name Carmack carries some clout and people listen to him (too) closely because of his reputation alone. This is soft power that automatically comes with responsibility.

You say your piece and if not heard, do an internal transfer. This whole don't tell people the truth about technical matters to not hurt their feelings or disrupt some people's paychecks is not serious business.

I want to know where you have found a workplace staffed entirely by androids. What you're advocating for would fall apart the moment it had contact with humans. It's why diplomacy is both necessary and difficult. It seems it is a lost art knowing how to navigate hard conversations and has been replaced with one of avoidance or tactless 'brutal honesty'.

Yes and he used it to try and stop something he saw as a total waste.

That’s not how big companies work.