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.

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.

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.

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.

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.