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

I've only seen John Carmack's public interactions, but they've all been professional and kind.

It's depressing to imagine HR getting involved because someone's feelings had been hurt by an objective discussion from a person like John Carmack.

I'm having flashbacks to the times in my career when coworkers tried to weaponize HR to push their agenda. Every effort was eventually dismissed by HR, but there is a chilling effect on everyone when you realize that someone at the company is trying to put your job at stake because they didn't like something you said. The next time around, the people targeted are much more hesitant to speak up.

meta was a weird place for a while. because of psc (the performance rating stuff) being so important… a public post could totally demoralize a team because if a legend like carmack thinks that your project is a waste of resources, how is that going to look on your performance review?

impact is facebook for “how useful is this to the company” and its an explicit axis of judgement.

Masters of doom portrays carmack as a total dictator of a boss. Doom Guy by John Romero seems to back this up

Hehehe. I have talked to John Carmack a few times. He's super harsh and has zero filter or social niceties (Azperger's level, not that he is, but just sayin'). If you are not used to it or understand where it's coming from, it can be quite a shock. Or at least he was, many years ago. Maybe he's changed.

I have mixed feelings about this. In one part, JC is someone I look up to, at least from the perspective of engineering. On the other hand, putting myself in the shoes in someone who got the once in life chance to build a new OS with corp support for a new shiny device…I for hell would want to do this.

Sorry but if you know his story, seen candid videos of him, or talked to the people around him, he's a Linus-level "I'll say what I want" type.

There weird hagiographies need to go. Carmack is absolutely not known to be kind. I have no idea what happened here but the idea that's he's this kindly old grandpa who could never, ever be rude or unprofessional is really out there.

> I've only seen John Carmack's public interactions, but they've all been professional and kind.

You don't know someone or how they really behave because they are a public figure.

I can see that. Sadly, there are a lot of people in the world who simply don't know how to deal with people who can be direct, if not somewhat abrasive, in their communication style. Their intent can be noble, well-intentioned, and not meant to offend. They simply don't beat around the bush or worry about whether your fragile ego will be bruised when they make an observation.

I've had to coach people and help them understand the entitlement involved in demanding that everyone adjust and adhere to their personal preferences and communication style. In my experience, it's about seeking to understand the person and adapt accordingly. Not everyone is willing to do that.

But... That's not an HR violation. If something a team is working on is a waste of resources, it's a waste. You can either realize that and pivot to something more useful (like an effort to take the improvements of the current OS project and apply them to existing OSes), or stubbornly insist on your value.

Why is complaining to HR even an option on the table?

Complaining is always an option. The problem is that HR actually takes the complaint seriously.

I saw the same thing at Google. A distinguished engineer tried gently at first to get a Jr engineer to stop trying to do something that was a bad idea. They persisted so he told them very bluntly to stop. HR got involved.

I even found myself letting really bad things go by because it was just going to take way to much of my time to spoon feed people and get them to stop.

John can be quite blunt and harsh in person, from everyone I know who’s interacted with him.

If he doesn’t believe in something, he can sometimes be over critical and it’s hard to push back in that kind of power imbalance.

One could argue that if it’s not in your swim lane, you just let it fail. And if you aren’t that person’s manager, you tell them the code or design that you are reviewing and thus the gatekeeper is not adequate. Politely. You said your part and no need to get yourself in trouble. Document and move on. If the company won’t listen then you move on. No need to turn it into a HR issue.

Exactly! It seems very narc-y. Just let me build my cool waste of company resources, it's not like Zucky is going to notice, he's too busy building his 11 homes.

Imagine being able to build an operating system, basically the end-game of being a programmer, and get PAID for it. Then some nerd tells on you.

Carmack is a legend and I admire his work, but he seems to believe his own legend these days (like a few others big-ego gamedevs) and that can lead to arbitrary preferences being sold as gospel.

For another take - what’s the game theory here?

If I’m kinda sensitive but also hyper-ambitious, I acknowledge that Facebook has

1. Some of the highest pay in the industry. 2. Ultra-competitive environment. 3. Low moral principles.

Seems like the strategy would be to use every lever at your disposal to manipulate your environment, rather than leave and risk getting paid less.

Which makes sense when you are one of 3 developers at ID software. There's absolutely no room for waste.

This is Meta. Let the kids build their operating system ffs. Is he now more concerned with protecting shareholder value? Who cares.

And stupid. Like it or hate it, a non-nonsense, direct speaking, but fair and objective boss is the one you want. No one is served by failure; not the people at the top, nor the people at the bottom.

There is a difference between “this project is not going to work” vs “these people are incompetent and the project should be cancelled as a result”. The former needs to be said, the latter is a HR violation.

I'm not sure if you are trying to be /s, but yeah that's basically what I'm trying to say. Definitely better than working on those recommendation systems.

Damn, I'd pay to work in some serious OS/Compiler teams, but hey why should they hire me? Oh well...Yeah I'm doing a bit of projects on my side but man I'm so burnt out by my 9am-5pm $$ job + 5pm-10pm kid job that I barely have any large chunk of time to work on those.

It is very much not an objective discussion if you are discussing whether it makes sense to develop a new operating system.

Not sarcastic at all. I'm in the same boat. I've been trying to get into contributing to Redox, but at the end of the work day when the kid is finally asleep it's hard to motivate.

I followed his posts internally before he left. He was strict about resource waste. Hand tracking would break constantly and he brought metrics to his posts. His whole point was that Apple has hardware nailed down and it’ll be efficient software that will be the differentiator. The bloat at Meta was the result of empire building.

I remember watching Carmack at a convention 15 years ago. He took a short sabbatical and came back with ID Tech 3 on an iPhone, and it still looks amazing well over a decade later.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52hMWMWKAMk&t=1s

This is a guy who figures that what he wants to do most with his 3 free weekends is to port his latest, greatest engine to a Cortex-A8. Leading corporate strategy? Maybe not. But Carmack on efficiency? Just do it.

I get it man. It’s really tough. How old is your kid? Mine is a 5 years old boy and he doesn’t seem to need a lot of sleep but a huge amount of companionship which really bugs me out.

In theory, it’s better to sleep early, get up around 5 and get 2 hours of quality time, but man he sometimes gets up around 6:15 and earlier, and I found it difficult to get good sleep anyway, so I tried to switch to 2 hours of night time, but he wants to sleep with me for 30 mins around 9pm before going to my wife’s bed, and I usually fell sleep sooner than he did…

Girls are much easier to raise. They sleep earlier and don’t fight too much, as far as I heard from friends.

Masters of Doom does seems to want to, however accurately or not, set Carmack up as the antagonist of its story against Romero as the hero sometimes. I think that readers just largely didn't notice that since Carmack's heroic image was already so firmly established. In fact some of the early-ID stuff really does seem to raise some questions. (Was Tim Willits mostly Carmack's protégé, for instance?)

>Is he now more concerned with protecting shareholder value? Who cares.

It doesn't sound like he's concerned with waste. It sounds like it's a typical Carmack argument - distilled and hyper logical, and his conclusion is more to do with the pointlessness of it. He actually concedes the point that the project may have been highly efficient (which it may or may not have been, he was steelmanning).

His main points seemed to be:

If every cycle matters and efficiency is paramount, just make the project monolithic C++ code. If every cycle matters, that is somewhat incompatible with general purpose OSs, and if it doesn't, the existing landscape is more than good enough. Presumably, he's calling out the absurdity of counter-arguments which are being unrealistic about the objectives of creating a new general purpose OS, while also focusing on extreme efficiency. He states that the requirements to fully achieve these objectives would require a "monastic coding enclave" like Plan 9 OS, and it wasn't realistic even with the high talent in Meta.

And that plays into the second point, which seems to essentially be "new OSs aren't a draw for developers, they are a burden". This is painfully obvious when looking at the history of OSs and software, and it's the obvious reason why "let the kids build their operating system ffs" should result in a reflexive "noooo..." from the greybeards. The deeper point though is that if A. is achieved, the B. Burden on devs will be even more onerous. Therefore unless the entire project is committed to truly moving crowds to new paradigms (good luck, literally billions have been lost here), just use the proven, faily high performance options that have widespread support.

The conclusion is "on balance, it's a bad idea." He's arguing it sharply (although I understand a Carmack steelman is intimidating to attack), but in essence it's a fairly banal and conservative conclusion, backed with strong precedent.

Expecting that you can change people, in my experience, is quixotic. What you can change is yourself and how you interpret and respond to events around you.

If I understand the hypothetical you've proposed, my advice would be for you to adapt and learn to be less sensitive rather than have you believe that you can manipulate the environment, or worse, directly manipulate people.

It's possible that you could be a positive influence for change, so I don't want to completed discount any effort there, but I also think it's worth being realistic about what you can actually affect.

Impressive. JC is always one of the engineers I look up to and read up to when depressed.

John Carmack, David Cutler, Tom West, Cameron Zwarich, etc. There are about maybe 50 of them.

I actually have some ideas about this kind of situation, drop me a line, email in my profile!

I'm sure that's true but I've worked with a lot of engineers that are of this caliber and as long as you can form a coherent logical explanation they will bend they're way more open than you expect. But you got to put in the work to make that argument. They won't take it on faith

Fully agree with this point we all know as engineers this shit is nails on the chalkboard.

I followed his posts internally too. It's amazing how many people were arguing against fucking John Carmack. What a waste of talent.

Meta's AR/VR division has burned a huge amount of money and years of time, with relatively little to show for it. Now it seems to be on the verge of being cancelled or slashed back, and in response people are saying that this proves VR, something Carmack champions, is commercially untenable or even that Carmack himself is partly responsible for the failed initiative. I don't even entirely agree with him on the question of whether anyone should try developing a new OS, but he's been proven absolutely right that there was no room for him to be that complacent about the use of Meta's resources.

Carmack and Jim Keller for me. Hardware engineering for the latter!

I got the chance to do this at Microsoft, it is indeed awesome! Thankfully the (multiple!) legendary programmers on the team were all behind the effort.

Anyway, if anyone reading this gets a chance to build a custom OS for bespoke HW, and get paid FAANG salary to do so, go for it! :-D

HW is kinda too magical for me at this age :)

Reading on from that he says:

> If the platform really needs to watch every cycle that tightly, you aren't going to be a general purpose platform, and you might as well just make a monolithic C++ embedded application, rather than a whole new platform that is very likely to have a low shelf life as the hardware platform evolves.

Which I think is agreeable, up to a certain point, because I think it's potentially naive. That monolithic C++ embedded application is going to be fundamentally built out of a scheduler, IO and driver interfaces, and a shell. That's the only sane way to do something like this. And that's an operating system.

But my point is that this is a highly competitive environment, the whole point in a highly competitive environment is to manipulate the environment and people. That’s what people get promoted for. So why not play the game? Again in the hypothetical if you are “less sensitive rather than believe you can manipulate the environment.” You lose.

But like it works for Musk and Trump, and probably hundreds of other leaders today, why not take their example? (Assuming again, your highly ambitious and competitive, I’m more pro social, so I’d take your route)

This is legitimately something I’ve been asking myself lately, we talk about a world that values one thing ( rationality, respect, pro social behavior) but reward another (pettiness, vindictive, selfishness). Why do we pretend?

Also, and maybe the most important point, John Carmack is 100% trying to manipulate his environment and people, that’s why he’s so successful!

The world is literally run by people who are good at manipulating people and their environment. That’s what an entrepreneur is, that’s what a politician is, that’s what an artist is. Your argument seems to mostly be people shouldn’t try to manipulate the world in a way that I don’t like.

Carmack's swim lane was exceptionally wide. My understanding was that this sort of criticism was actually his main job duty.

> Their intent can be noble, well-intentioned, and not meant to offend. They simply don't beat around the bush or worry about whether your fragile ego will be bruised when they make an observation.

I mean maybe, but maybe Carmac is just an ass hole... He can be a "legend" in the software development world and also just not be a super great person socially. The two things aren't mutually exclusive.

I don't disagree with you entirely, but being "direct" isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card for poor interpersonal skills. It's not always about "fragile egos" or "entitlement", it's about basic professionalism and communication.

Look at the outcome of Meta's performance in AR/VR over the past few years: a fortune has been spent; relatively little has been achieved; the whole thing is likely about to be slashed back; VR, something Carmack believes in, remains a bit commercially marginal and easily dismissed; and Carmack's own reputation has taken a hit from association with it all. You can understand perfectly well why he doesn't feel that it would have been harmless to just let other people have whatever fun they wanted with the AR/VR Zuckbucks.

(Mind you, Carmack himself was responsible for Oculus' Scheme-based VRScript exploratory-programming environment, another Meta-funded passion project that didn't end up going far. It surely didn't cost remotely as much as XROS though.)

I’ve been on both the same side and the opposing side of debates with him, both in person and over internal discussion threads. His public persona and private behavior match. I viewed it positively, though per the topic of the thread, not everyone did.

How large is their headcount these days? And how many actually useful products have they launched in the last decade? You could probably go full Twitter and fire 90% of the people, and it would make no difference from a user perspective.

Imagine being a meta engineer and not taking Carmack's advice seriously.

Why the fuck is he even hired there if you are not going to listen to him.

Dude has forgotten more things about game development than you will ever know...

Tim Sweeney of Epic is up there for me too.

It is an entirely different thing, gifted, highly experienced and confident in his assertions is quite frequent, but the cult-like following and status of personalities like Carmack or Blow can seriously alter their own self perception and importance.

There were almost no kids on the XROS team. The bulk of the team were E6s with graying hairs, multiple kids, and very impressive history of work on other well-known operating systems -- and most of them wrote a lot of code. This was the senior-est team I ever was a member of. Also, the most enjoyable interview process I've ever been through, no bullshit whatsoever and a rare case that I actually had to implement the exact thing that I was asked about during the interview (took me 3 weeks compared to 20 minutes during the loop, go figure).

XROS was an org that hired for specific specialist positions (as opposed to the usual "get hired into FB, go through the bootcamp, and find your place within the company"). At one point we got two separate requests from the recruiting execs: - Your tech screen pass rate is way too low compared to other teams at FB. Please consider making your tech screen easier to expand the pool of candidates. - Your interview-to-offer rate is way too low compared to other teams at FB. Please consider making your tech screen more difficult to reduce time that engineers spend on interviewing and writing feedback.

Anyway, IMO it was a very strong team in a very wrong environment. Most of the folks on the team hated the Facebook culture, despised the PSC process (despite having no problems with delivering impact in a greenfield project), had very little respect for non-technical managers coming from FB proper (the XROS team saw themselves as part of Oculus), and the majority I believe fled to other companies as soon as the project was scrapped. The pay was good however, and the work was very interesting. My overall impression was that most people on the team saw XROS as a journey, not a destination, and it was one of the reasons why it was destined to never ship.

There were quite a few of high-caliber individuals with equally impressive resumes in the organization to match Carmack's wisdom and ego.

Carmack absolutely 100% percent did not say "these people are incompetent". What he said boils down to "these people are world's best experts on writing operating systems and they'd love to write a new one from the scratch but I strongly believe that writing a new operating system is not the best path forward."

Yup. This is how bloat is created.

That’s what I’m saying. It sounds like a dream job. Like you said it’s a journey not a destination, but it’s also a journey on one of the wealthiest companies in the worlds dime, so it’s kinda lame when someone calls it out for being suboptimal. That’s why I said who cares. It’s not going to hurt meta in the long run.

> were arguing against fucking John Carmack

I am sure Carmack himself encourages debates and discussions. Lionizing one person can't be expected of every employee (unless that person is also the founder or the company is tiny).

I believe the suboptimality concern was more about time to market and innovation velocity, and less about money. At the time FB felt a real sense of urgency given the anticipated AR/VR explosion (in a good sense) and presence of competitors in the space, both real and imaginary.

This is what got Lucovsky pushed out. He wanted to build OS from scratch and couldn't see past the technical argument and acknowledge the Product's team urgency to actually land something in the hands of customers. Meanwhile, he left a trail of toxicity that he doesn't even realize was there[0].

Interestingly, he was pulling the same bs at Google until reason prevailed and he got pushed out (but allowed to save face and claim he resigned willingly[1]).

[0] https://x.com/yewnyx/status/1793684535307284948 [1] https://x.com/marklucovsky/status/1678465552988381185

If you're in high leadership, even just being pessimistic can be a massive morale killer. It doesn't mean that going to HR is the right call but I could see how someone would vent that way.

Can’t really imagine a better person to argue against?

Of course it can. It’s hard not to assume you are right if everyone keeps telling you so. I can’t really fault them for that. The challenge is to continue being right more often than not.

No, no. If you want your VR apps running in two years on something that looks like an OS, just build an app that runs on an existing one.

If you want to be the dominant player in the market in 10-15 years, build the OS and keep funding it.

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

This is one of the reasons I’m sick of working pretty much anywhere anymore: I can’t be myself.

Appreciating people for their differences when they are humble and gifted is easy. I side with liberals, but I have a mix of liberal, moderate, and conservative friends.

But there are only so many years of pretending to appreciate all of the self-focused people that could be so much better at contributing to the world if they could quietly and selflessly work hard and respect people with different beliefs and backgrounds.

I’m happy for the opportunity I have to work, and I understand how millennials think and work. But working with boomers and/or gen X-ers would be so much less stressful. I could actually have real conversations with people.

I don’t think the problem is really with HR. I think the problem is a generation that was overly pandered to just doesn’t mix with the other generations, and maybe they shouldn’t.

Are you arguing that everyone's power is equal? What an asinine position.

That’s very different than simply observing someone in public. Which is what my post was referring too to and so it remains accurate.

FWIW I like carmack from what I have seen publically (and Romero, who I have interacted with) but I wouldn’t pretend to know who either of them really are from my observation of them.

> Carmack absolutely 100% percent did not say "these people are incompetent".

Sorry if I wasn’t clear; this was the point I was actually trying to make. Direct and to the point should not a HR incident make. I was trying to contrast with something that would.

It must either be a belief that everyone is equal, and that they would be comfortable telling Carmack that he’s wrong.

Or it’s an appeal to authority in that if a person of authority says it then they must be right so there’s no reason to push back in the first place.

No matter how big or small one's "swim lane" is, an argument on technical merits without getting personal or discriminatory (assuming this was the case with J.C.) is never an HR issue. The whole "Weaponizing HR" thing is a nightmare and should not be acceptable.

of course he has more power, but at this point, he's earned it.

and also, it wasn't enough to "win" against a den-of-wolves place filled with power-players like meta.

Just because something isn't an HR violation doesn't mean it's not wrong, rude, or unprofessional. Society is not a computer program. Being tactful is important to well adjusted people.

Hard disagree. Being tactful is only relevant when dealing with people, criticise an idea, a project, a solution as much as you like. Intellectual debate is the fire from which genuinely good ideas are forged.

Seriously? Have you never had a person more powerful than you tell you that you’re wrong when they in fact are wrong? Often in corporate environments the answer to a “what to do next” question isn’t easily provable, and people who take advantage of this can make life really suck.

meta tends to keep people so on edge, with performance so heavily based on peer agreement, that it creates a sort of defensive toxic positivity

a little bit a negative feedback at high level can domino quickly too. massive pivots, reorgs, the works.

Although I have have met and currently work with many people who struggle with direct interactions to an extent where one could consider it a personal problem, I have also found that people who are direct or don't "beat around the bush" also often get VERY upset when treated similarly.

I'm not saying that there's no space for direct communication and that everyone needs to be formal and socially polite during every interaction. But I've met many people who act like you describe John does who very much do not appreciate getting it back, implying some level of awareness that their directness is hurtful on occasion.

I've only met a few direct people who can take it as well.

Please name them all. Would love to read and watch their content. I usually come across a decade later and like, whaaat.. how did i miss this. Man i could have had better time watching them instead of doom scrolling.

Where are the good war stories on Keller?

I saw a few of those. He really leaned in on just how much waste was in the UI rendering, with some nasty looking call times to critical components. I think it was close to when he left.

Dude just seemed frustrated with the lack of attention to things that mattered.

But...that honestly tracks with Meta's past and present.

I chatted with someone on the language side of the project (I believe the same project) and it was fascinating how ambitious the concept was. I do wish it was finished or open sourced though

It did hurt Meta. No one has infinite resources even if it seems that way to us.

Facebook has literally done very little in terms of new breakthrough products in a decade at least, and Bytedance has apparently just beat them on revenue.

If you want to do it you should be able to defend it against contrarian arguments that it’s a waste of time and company resources.

Carmack saw it as a waste of time. Is this really what we are doing now? Justifying that my waste of company resources is no less inefficient than the others?

The software for the Quest 3 is unreliable and breaks often. A team that attacks attempts to hold them accountable makes a lot of sense.

The metaverse has really showcased that.

They finally have feet now, right?

Only light fun. I'm just a little perplexed at their progress and direction over the past 7-8 years. I don't understand how they can have so many high caliber people and put out...that.

I don't think you should treat the founder more special than eg John Carmack.

But I agree that civil discussion is good.

Unfortunately people have ideas, projects, and solutions that they care deeply about. Like it or not, some tact when dealing with these things goes a long way.

What kind of thing is bad enough that it warrants multiple discussions without the junior engineer getting the hint that it’s a bad idea?

I disagree that you should just defer - but it’s sad that politics was obviously consuming and inhibiting his ability to help the product.

Like, everyone who is Dutch?

> They sleep earlier and don’t fight too much, as far as I heard from friends.

Definitely depends on the specific children!

> Unfortunately people have ideas, projects, and solutions that they care deeply about.

This is true of course, but this is also true for the “search for truth” in science. Do we fail to point out the flaw in the reasoning of someone’s life's work for fear of offence? The truth is the higher ideal that must be strived for!

In the same way, an idea is only good once it has been challenged. It may fail and dissolve, it may survive, it may morph into something that can no longer be assailed. This is the forgers fire, and it is necessary.

I know this isn’t as black and white as I’m painting it, but the ideal is still something worth striving for.

Yeah, people getting really angry if you say anything bad about a product (!) is a depressing commonality in certain places these days.

I got angry emails from people because I wrote "replacing a primary page of UI with this feature I never use doesn't give me a lot of value" because statements like that make "the team feel bad". It was an internal beta test with purpose of finding issues before they go public.

Not surprisingly, once this culture holds root, the products start going down the drain too.

But who cares about good products in this great age of AI, right?

I mostly notice that those people aren't emotionally grown up enough to actually produce good results.

When your emotions over your work become more important than the quality of the work you're outputting, you become a problem for people who use your work.

A junior engineer can make an API that can basically live forever as tech debt.

(Especially if it's an "API" persisted to disk)

How is it not?

When I compare workplace dynamics in the American company I work for with local company a friend of mine works for, I feel like I sold my soul to the devil.

It will be easy to dismiss any critisism when it's forced to be vague.

Zachary's Showstopper book is a great account of Dave Cutler and WinNT.

Would love to hear Carmack's thoughts on render cost...

I'm now a post kids greybeard; two nats, two steps, both flavours. Yes, girls under 10 are easier than boys. That flips on you in the teen years!

First, look at what they’re shipping, then decide the likelihood of them being right.

Maybe you know something they don’t; it’s actually very likely. But maybe what you think matters actually doesn’t at all and ultimately they’re right.

In either case, they were shipping, so best to listen and be prepared if you disagree.

This is how megacorps die. You’re describing Intel-level complacency.

I think the issue is, Carmack didn't talk like a "normal" facebook engineer.

Supposedly you were meant to have you disagreements in private, and come to support what ever was decided. "hold your opinions lightly" The latest version of it was something like "disagree and commit".

This meant that you got a shit tonne of group think.

This pissed off Carmack no end, because it meant shitty decisions were let out the door. He kept on banging on about "time to fun". This meant that any feature that got in the way of starting a game up as fast a possible, would get a public rebuke. (rightly so)

People would reply with "but the metric we are trying to move is x,y & z" which invariably would be some sub-team PSC (read promotion/bonus/not getting fired system) optimisation. Carmack would basically say that the update was bad, and they should feel bad. This didn't go down well, because up until 2024 one did not speak negatively about anything on workplace. (Once carmack reported a bug to do with head tracking[from what I recall] there was lots of backwards and forwards, with the conclusion that "won't fix, dont have enough resources". Carmack replied with a diff he'd made fixing the issue.)

Basically Carmack was all about the experience, and Facebook was all about shipping features. This meant that areas of "priority" would scale up staffing. Leaders distrusted games engineers("oh they don't pass our technical interviews"), so pulled in generalists with little to no experience of 3D.

This translated in small teams that produced passable features growing 10x in 6 months and then producing shit. But because they'd grown so much, they constantly re-orged pushed out the only 3d experts they had, they could then never deliver. But as it was a priority, they couldn’t back down

This happened to:

Horizons (the original roblox clone)

video conferencing in oculus

Horizons (the shared experience thing, as in all watching a live broadcast together)

Both those horizons (I can't remember what the original names were) Were merged into horizons world, along with the video conferencing for workplace

originally each team was like 10, by the time that I left, it was something like a thousand or more. With the original engineers either having left or moved on to something more productive.

tldr: Facebook didn't take to central direction setting, ie before we release product x, all its features must work, be integrated with each other, and have a obvious flow/narrative that links them together. Carmack wanted a good product, facebook just wanted to iterate shit out the door to see what stuck.

> This is Meta. Let the kids build their operating system ffs.

the problem was, it was holding back products. Because if youre going to make your own OS, it changes what chips you put in. If you don't know what chipset you're going to have, you don;t know what your pixel budget is, you can't plan features.

It takes about 2 years to get hardware out the door, and another 1.5 years to iron out the bugs and get a "finished" product.

Damn, that's medieval. Anyone should be able to challenge anyone regardless of status.

No one should just defer, but you better be right. In the end do they have a better product without him?

Don’t think so.

I was one month into my first full-time job, when I've (unknowingly of his rank) challenged the CTO in a technical discussion - in a public email exchange. Regardless of the outcome - I've been treated like an equal. This one short exchange has influenced not only the rest of my career, but my entire worldview.

I mean to some extent sure. But also you need to respect expertise and experience. So much of what we do is subjective, and neither side going to have hard data to support their arguments.

If it comes down to someone saying “I’ve been doing this for 30 years, I’ve shipped something very similar 5 times, and we ran into a problem with x each time”. Unless you have similar counter experience, you should probably just listen.

What happens in tech is you get a very specific kind of junior who wants to have HN comment arguments at work constantly and needs you to prove every single thing to them. I don’t know man it’s a style guide. There’s not going to be hard quantitative evidence to support why we said you shouldn’t reach for macros first.

The quality you can achieve with simple painted textures and computed lightmaps never ceases to impress.

It's insane how VR has succeeded beyond most people's wildest dreams on the hardware front (all that hardware that goes into a VR headset either sounded like science fiction or seemed like would be exotic stuff costing tens of thousands of dollars), and the software also had standout successes, but it kinda just petered out both in the entertainment and professional realms.

Ugh. Can we as an industry stop blowing people up like this? It’s a clear sign that the community is filled with people with very little experience.

I remember this guy wanted $20 million to build AGI a year ago (did he get that money?), and people here thought he would go into isolation for a few weeks and come out with AGI because he made some games like that. It’s just embarrassing as a community.

Yeah, yeah all that’s true. Ideas are better if they’re challenged, etc. but the fact is people don’t like being challenged.

Also, software engineering is a field where there’s rarely some ideal truth we’re trying to achieve, and indeed even in science, people do often fail to point out flaws in reasoning for fear of offense.

Hard to believe that, although maybe they considered their own resumes equally impressive.

>That monolithic C++ embedded application is going to be fundamentally built out of a scheduler, IO and driver interfaces, and a shell. That's the only sane way to do something like this. And that's an operating system.

Exactly! I picture the choice being grandfathering in compatibility with existing OSes (having the promised performance of their product in fact indirectly modulated by the output of all other teams of world's smartest throughout computing history and present day), vs wringing another OS-sized piece of C++ tech debt upon unsuspecting humanity. In which case I am thankful to Carmack for making the call.

I can understand how "what you're doing is fundamentally pointless" is something they can only afford to hear from someone who already has their degree of magnitude of fuck-you money. Furthermore in a VC-shaped culture it can also be a statement that's to many people fundamentally incomprehensible

What was your experience working with him?

Professional engineers cannot be made immune to criticism.

I tend to get upset at people who are obviously beating around the bush.

Computer History Museum interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xh8nhK7WS80

Worked on DEC Alpha, AMD K7 & K8, Broadcom, P.A. Semi, was in turn purchased by Apple. Jim spent four years at Apple before first returning to AMD, then on to Tesla, Intel and finally Tenstorrent.

Keller keynoting TSMC's 2022 Open Innovation Summit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32CRYenTcdw

I admit you encouraged me to think a little more about how the person (like myself, in many ways), might feel to be called abrasive, difficult, or any other negative thing.

It makes me want to reframe this a little with your statement 'understand the person and adapt accordingly.' As someone who has learned their social skills later, I think it's usually more of a responsibility of the abrasive person to adapt their communication style and know when it is best used.

Specifically, I think abrasive and direct works great in high trust environments. It has served me well as well. It does sometimes relate to autism for me, ymmv.

Anyway the reason why it doesn't work outside of high trust environments is that people have feelings, and their feelings matter. Ultimately you do have a responsibility to try and be considerate. So like, for me I try to separate the high trust and low trust environments in my life, and keep the part of me that's direct and abrasive (often among peers in technical context) less vocal in the low trust environment.

When I intentionally want to push back in a low trust environment, I try to check in more with the person, look to where they seem uncomfortable, and double check I understand what their insecurities might be in a certain context as that often increases defensiveness.

Sometimes in low trust environments I might not notice, or I might identify it as low trust and just not care. In those contexts yeah I'll be the disgruntled aspie ;) but in other contexts I want to connect to people and really think through the impact of my words not the righteousness.

If you want to build 3d glasses probably you should fpcus on 3d glassess and software for it.

Not some new OS so you can start making the glasses 2 years later.

Just like when you want to bake a cake, you dont start by designing an oven, or creating an universe from scratch

Projects to land them a fat salary while delivering no value.

No wonder they used any means necessary (including HR) to defend their source of money.

They probably knew very well they are a net loss for the company.

Lots of big orgs have such crooks. It's a failure of management not to fire them.

If you are senior leadership and you find that your org has some people do useless side projects for fun (and tons of money) what delivers no value, your job is to solve this problem by reassigning or firing them.

Facebook VR never needed a new OS in the first place. It needed actual VR.

> $20 million

That’s a pittance for such a project. I wish we could see what he’d have come up with.

I think the implication is that they were arguing poorly and wasting time

That sounds scary…I don’t know how to communicate with teenage boys. I had a lot of quarrels with my parents back then.

I guess so. But the sample size is over 10, although not statistically significant but definitely something.

Is it really that successful? I think the wildest dream is that everyone is using it but I don’t really see it happening anytime soon in the future.

Carmack's best work was between Keen and Quake, and it was mostly optimizations that pushed the limit of what PC graphics could do. He's always been too in-the-weeds to have a C-level title.

I can’t say much without it being clear who it was, but a critical low level thing.

And the Sr was generally a very nice person who did not give much weight to levels, willing to engage with anyone.

AR/VR was always a side project for Zuck (like the Aquila airplane or the Libra cryptocurrency or AGI) that he works on because he's bored. It was pretty clear from the product's popularity and Metaverse experience that it didn't have any legs. Carmack had little to do with that one way or the other, and the Apple Vision pro shows that it's not an execution or quality issue, it's product-market fit.

i would absolutely feel comfortable challenging him in a well-intentioned and non-disruptive manner. it's entirely possible i'd get shitcanned afterwards and if so, that's fine, it wouldn't've worked out anyways for me if that's the environment. i've personally never been afraid to challenge people above me on the org chart who have the ability to fire me with a snap of their fingers (again, in appropriate, non-grossly confrontational ways). it's generally worked out quite well for me and tends to gain me respect in the eyes of my superiors. successful people tend not to have great respect for sycophants.

the good news is that in this hypothetical i'd be skilled and talented enough to be working with john fucking carmack so i wouldn't exactly be concerned about my ability to find a new gig in about 3 days. that's my point. now if there were evidence he'd be liable to blackball me in some way (no evidence of that to my knowledge), then the power disparity argument has more legs in my opinion.

Well unfortunately even relatively high quality organizations are filled with people like that.

sigh I know, I know. :/

He is just a guy who can write game code well and has good PR skills online. I wouldn’t give him a cent if he promised anything in the AI field, no matter how much a bunch of online people gas him up.

If the younger generation is too pandered and can’t take criticism or honest feedback, thats the fault of the older generation.

yeah and Doom Guy takes a lot of issues with Masters of Doom. You get the impression that MoD was looking to create a McCartney vs Lennon story and stretched the truth to do so (there are several factual errors in the book).

In Doom Guy, though, Romero says that after he left iD, he heard from others still working there that the company had become something of a dictatorship under Carmack, and that within X months (I forget how many), half the company had quit. Romero also qualifies several times that they were all in their early/mid-20s and didn't have the requisite life experience to be handling business situations well

I just can't believe that an OS needs to be forked off for such a workload

iPhones and Macs share a kernel and a large portion of user space and syscalls, right?

If the GPL is a problem just fork some BSD like the PS3 did, and pretend you're maintaining code that you already spent five years on

I know you need low latency for XR + VR + AR - everyone needs low latency for everything. So they could build on whatever has been done for audio and networking and Android touch screens that all want low latency too

I'm speaking foolishly from outside but making "an OS for" something is more commonly marketing speak than a good idea. Like this fucking "OS for cities" and "OS for work" stuff. That's an OS the way a cookie recipe is an OS for a fucking oven. The casual insistence on misunderstanding important things really gets my goats

Side project that they renamed entire company after

I’d really love to hear his story from the beginning. I believe his first published game was a Blue Disk one, ZZT, in 1991, and he went forward to write the Unreal engine which was released in 1998. People like Tim and John really could bag a huge amount of knowledge in half a decade.

He's a guy that knows a lot of math and how to turn that math into code. I don't know if he'd be able to come up with some brand new paradigm for AI but I'd want him on my team and I'd listen to what he has to say.

I meant success in the technical sense - they managed to get the tech as good as it could realistically get - and cheap too.

But it turned out nobody cared. People who envisioned doctors using VR glasses to look at MR images in 3D, architects, modelers, mechanical engineers, who people thought would use 3D to do work turned out to not want it.

Immersive games were created, that looked and ran amazing, and afforded a never-before-seen level of interactivity, but after a few standout successes, people just moved on.

It's like Apple got to about the iPhone 4 level (where most people would agree the experience was decent), then everybody decided to go back to their old Nokias.

AI math is not game code math. There are plenty of actual experts in AI who know “how to turn math into code” with years of experience. I would not want this guy, his ego, his lack of social skills, his online fanbase, and his lack of experience in AI to be anywhere near my AI team.

At that time, Rage was delayed forever I consider it vaporware, falling the same category was Half-Life 3 or Duke Nukem Forever.

Still, I saw this demo at that time and I felt it was impressive considering the toy level performance of 2010's smartphone.

Yep, and the common mantra is that "ambitious" and "v1" shall never occur together in the same sentence.

There were many, many influential software projects done in the past that are not games. Some of the people responsible worked in AR/VR and drove its vision and technical roadmaps.

First of all, AR/VR is a tough problem space, often for reasons not immediately obvious to common folk. Second, Facebook in my opinion is a wrong home for long-term efforts that may not bear fruit for many years, with its 6-month attention span of employee performance management and its "move fast and break things" culture (both of which clashed with the meticulous hardware-oriented Oculus culture). And finally, a significant portion of people working in AR/VR didn't believe in AR/VR as a product. Some were there for the gravy train, some were there for interesting OS work, some were there for bleeding-edge technology, but I'd say less than half would say "we're working on something that people will love and pay money for". To me it felt more like well-funded academia even and less like a startup (which it was supposed to be).

In my experience the one big problem on the Quest 3 is the user interface. I am still puzzled why they made a floating taskbar with tiny buttons that you have to hit with VR controllers. I have good eyes, decent hand-eye coordination and don't have shaky hands, yet I manage to hit a button at first try maybe 40% of the time. They made a cut-down 2D desktop interface that makes up a small fraction of the field of view for a VR device and called it a day, and then put the user into some virtual room with zero interactable elements.

Meta Quest 3 feels like sci-fi tech with badly executed UI design from the 90s.