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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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...

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

sigh I know, I know. :/

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).