John Carmack's Resignation Letter

Comments moved to the related ongoing thread:

John Carmack Leaves Meta - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34022484 - Dec 2022 (804 comments)

(Since the comments there already consisted mostly of responses to this same letter, I think it makes sense to merge the threads and have done so)

There is a lot of talk about big-tech inefficiency. It's not clear what the 'inefficiency' number is, maybe it's 50% (as suggested by Carmack) but it's also not clear other industries are much better. I think, just generally, it's hard to get a group of humans to do anything collectively. From my experience working in 'small', 'medium', and 'big-tech' is that 'big-tech' is probably above average even just due to the general emphasis on using good internal software/tooling.

It'd be interesting to see larger companies experiment with more radical organizational structures. For me I'd try to reduce the number of layers of management and automate/decentralize the more manager-y tasks. Things like expense reports and performance management can be better orchestrated by dedicated roles + software with peer reviews/committees/calibration. Coaching can be handled by a mix of more senior peers for technical issues or dedicated performance coaches for less technical issues (rather the one person who is maybe good at one of these). Interviewing/hiring can be done by ICs, again orchestrated by software and dedicated roles. Similarly workplace issues and disputes could be remedied by dedicated HR/arbiters and peer committee if needed. You could make this extra work opt-opt for those that want to focus on just ICing. The hardest part is a way to do effective resource management outside a free market- fundamentally it'd be nice if you model an actual free market where multiple internal teams can organically form and make proposals for projects to fund or bid for funded projects. Sill if you did the first few things, I think that'd strip away at least two layers of management which would be pretty good.