John Carmack legendary game designer, rocket man The VR enthusiast has announced that he will be leaving behind both Meta/Facebook and the virtual reality business itself as one of its most prominent champions in a decade.
Carmack the position is executive consultant. Initially, he sent a farewell message to his colleagues in an internal memo, but when parts of it leaked to the media, he decided to post everything on his Facebook page instead, including some explanations.
Here is the complete:
My decade in VR is over.
I have mixed feelings.
The Quest 2 is exactly what I wanted to see from the start: mobile hardware, inside-out tracking, optional PC streaming, a 4K (ish) screen, and cost-effectiveness. Despite all the frustrations I have about our software, millions of people still get the value of it. It’s a success, and successful products make the world a better place. Everything could have happened a little sooner and gone better if a different decision had been made, but we built something pretty close to being right.
The problem is our efficiency.
Some will ask why I care about progress as long as it is happening.
If I were to sway others, I would say that an organization that knows nothing but inefficiency is ill-prepared for the inevitable competition and belt tightening.Manufacturing. I’m annoyed by it.
[edit: I was being overly poetic here, as several people have missed the intention. As a systems optimization person, I care deeply about efficiency. When you work hard at optimization for most of your life, seeing something that is grossly inefficient hurts your soul. I was likening observing our organization’s performance to seeing a tragically low number on a profiling tool.]
We have a tremendous amount of manpower and resources, but we are constantly self-sabotaging and wasting our efforts. There is no way to sugar coat this. I think our organization is operating at half the efficiency that I am happy with. Some may sneer and claim we’re doing just fine, but laugh and say, “Half? Ha! Quarter efficiency!”
It was a struggle for me. I have the highest level of voice here so I should be able to move things around but it doesn’t seem convincing. After passing and the evidence piles up, he eventually changes his ways, but killing stupid things before they can cause damage or setting direction and forcing the team to really stick I could not do it. that. I think my influence on the margins was positive, but it has never been a driving force.
This was clearly self-harm. He could have moved to Menlo Park after the Oculus acquisition and tried to battle generations of leadership, but he was busy programming, hated programming, was bad at it, and thought he would probably lose. for now.
Enough complaining. I’m sick of fighting and have my own startup to run, but the battle can still be won! No company is in a position to make it happen. We might really get there by just going with our current practices, but there’s a lot of room for improvement.
Make better decisions and “Give a Damn” into your products!
As his account states, his comments may seem terrible, but they are not necessarily related to the individuals he worked with or the decisions he made on his behalf. They are about his clear passion for the idea of optimization itself, a structural and systemic problem that in a company as big as Meta is used to writing code and launching rockets into space. It can be frustrating for some people.
This is usually part of the story and I drop some guesses. Perhaps how such a high-profile departure could pose problems for meta’s efforts in space, but lol, I think meta does enough work to scream it from the rooftops.
