John Carmack has announced his departure from Meta and VR development

It’s the end of my contract in VR. I have mixed feelings Question 2 is exactly what I wanted to see from the start – mobile hardware, indoor and outdoor tracking, optional PC streaming, 4K(ish) display, cost effective. Despite all the complaints I have about our software, millions of people still benefit from it. We have a good product. It is a best-selling product, and best-selling products make the world a better place. Everything could have happened a little faster and worked better if different decisions had been made, but we built something very close to the right thing.

The question is our effectiveness, some will ask why do I care how progress happens, as long as it happens, if I am trying to influence others, I would say that an organization that has suffered from inefficiency is not only not ready for competitive determinism and/or belt-tightening, but in fact, who It’s more unusual to see a GPU utilization rate of 5% in production. I’m upset about that.

[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 ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly sabotage ourselves and waste our efforts. There is no way to cover it with sugar. I think our organization is working at half the efficiency that would make me happy. Some laughed and said we’re doing a good job, but others laughed and said “Half? Ha! I’m in a quarter efficiency!” That I’m not persuasive enough. A lot of the things I complain about end up coming to me after a year or two and the evidence is mounting, but I’ve never been able to kill stupid things before they do damage, or set a trend and have a team really committed to it. I think that My impact on the sideline has been positive, but it’s never been a major driver.

Admittedly, self-inflicted – I could have moved to Menlo Park after the Oculus acquisition and tried to fight with Generations of Command, but I’ve been so busy with programming that I thought I’d hate it, that I’d be bad at it, and you’d probably lose anyway, It is enough. I’m tired of fighting and I have a startup to launch, but the battle is still winnable! Virtual reality can bring value to most people around the world, and no company is better positioned to do so than Meta. Certainly, it is possible to achieve this by moving forward with current practices, but there is a lot of room for improvement.

Make better decisions and fill your products with “Give a Damn”!