John Carmack resigns as a consultant at Meta

John Carmack, the programmer who brought us Doom, Quake, and Oculus/Meta virtual reality products, has resigned of his role as executive consultant for virtual reality at Meta.

In a message to employees, Carmack said, “This is the end of my decade in VR. I have mixed feelings.”

Carmack joined Oculus’ VR team in 2013, resigned from Bethesda’s id Software and moved from traditional games to VR. He continued after Facebook acquired Oculus in 2014 for $4 billion. In 2019, he stepped down from the CTO role at Oculus for the advisory role.

“Quest 2 is almost exactly what I wanted to see from the start: mobile hardware, inside-out tracking, optional PC streaming, 4K(ish) screen, cost-effective,” he wrote. “Despite all the complaints I have about our software, millions of people are still getting value from it. We have a good product. It’s successful, and successful products make the world a better place. It could have all happened a little faster and better if other decisions had been made, but we built something that is pretty close to the right thing.”

He said the problem was the company’s efficiency. He said an organization that has only known inefficiency is “ill-prepared for the inevitable competition and or belt-tightening, but in reality it’s the more personal pain of seeing a 5% GPU utilization rate in manufacturing.” .I am offended by it.” (In a Facebook messageCarmack said he was “overly poetic” here.

Carmack said: “We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we are constantly sabotaging ourselves and wasting effort. There is no way to sugarcoat this; I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy Some will scoff and claim we’re doing fine, but others will laugh and say, “Half? Ha! I’m on quarter efficiency!”

He said this has been a struggle for him, and while he has a top-level voice, he feels he should have been able to keep things going. He said he’s “never been able to kill stupid things before they do damage, or set a direction and a team actually stuck to it.” He called this self-inflicted, as he never moved to Menlo Park, where Meta is located. But he said he was into programming and probably would have lost leadership battles anyway.

“Enough complaining,” he said. “I was tired of the fight and have my own startup to run, but the fight is still winnable! VR can add value to most people in the world, and no company is better positioned to do so than Meta. You may be able to get there by just plowing through with current practices, but there is plenty of room for improvement.”

In August, Carmack tweeted that his Times Technologies had raised $20 million. Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth thanked Carmack for his work in a tweet.

Carmack often criticized his bosses in internal and external communications. And he also often blamed Bethesda’s owner ZeniMax Media, which acquired id Software in 2009. ZeniMax and id sued Oculus and Oculus founder Palmer Luckey in 2014 for alleged misappropriation of trade secrets. The complaint cited Carmack’s role in helping Oculus while still working for ZeniMax. The lawsuit was settled in 2018.