I resigned from my position as an executive consultant for VR with Meta. My internal post to the company got leaked to the press, but that just results in them picking a few choice bits out of it. Here is the full post, just as the internal employees saw it:
This is the end of my decade in VR.
I have mixed feelings.
Quest 2 is almost exactly what I wanted to see from the beginning – mobile hardware, inside out tracking, optional PC streaming, 4k (ish) screen, cost effective. Despite all the complaints I have about our software, millions of people are still getting value out of it. We have a good product. It is successful, and successful products make the world a better place. It all could have happened a bit faster and been going better if different decisions had been made, but we built something pretty close to The Right Thing.
The issue is our efficiency.
Some will ask why I care how the progress is happening, as long as it is happening? If I am trying to sway others, I would say that an org that has only known inefficiency is ill prepared for the inevitable competition and/or belt tightening, but really, it is the more personal pain of seeing a 5% GPU utilization number in production. I am offended 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 ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort. There is no way to sugar coat this; I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy. Some may scoff and contend we are doing just fine, but others will laugh and say “Half? Ha! I’m at quarter efficiency!”
It has been a struggle for me. I have a voice at the highest levels here, so it feels like I should be able to move things, but I’m evidently not persuasive enough. A good fraction of the things I complain about eventually turn my way after a year or two passes and evidence piles up, but I have never been able to kill stupid things before they cause damage, or set a direction and have a team actually stick to it. I think my influence at the margins has been positive, but it has never been a prime mover.
This was admittedly self-inflicted – I could have moved to Menlo Park after the Oculus acquisition and tried to wage battles with generations of leadership, but I was busy programming, and I assumed I would hate it, be bad at it, and probably lose anyway. Enough complaining. I wearied of the fight and have my own startup to run, but the fight is still winnable! VR can bring value to most of the people in the world, and no company is better positioned to do it than Meta. Maybe it actually is possible to get there by just plowing ahead with current practices, but there is plenty of room for improvement.
Make better decisions and fill your products with “Give a Darn”!
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Man who sold his soul regrets it, wow
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Inshallah the theocratic state of Iran will nuke the silicon Valley and turn it back into Silicon
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Promise?
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So, when he's complaining about inefficiency, I assume that to mean the increasing handholding that modern programming provides, the removal of hurdles that would have filtered out the less talented in previous generations, and big tech's push to hire a diverse workforce, regardless of skill, means that he's sick and tired of working with
all day.
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This is true, but also as a company gets bigger you probably also get more people that just want to make their paycheck and don't care about the 'vision' or whatever. In this case it would be an issue with management as long as those employees do the job they're hired to do.
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RIP only smart guy left working at facebook. Future oculus releases are going to be like the yearly "upgrade" of a fricking cell phone.
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I hope if he got paid in stock options that he sold last year.
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Vr is r-slurred without a ridiculous amount of dedicated peripherals, ar is inevitable.
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AR will take off when smart contact lenses can immediately show women's OnlyFans pages as you're walking down the street.
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I'll wait until an ai art bot trained off their onlyfans replaces them with a naked version of themselves in real time.
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Cool that he's got his own thing to work on now. I'll definitely have to keep an eye on what he's up to.
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Ok well better luck next time I guess
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Quest 2 seems like a good product but terribly priced. It's between the Series S and Series X/PS5, or at a decent GPU nowadays. You have to justify getting this device where you can only play a small selection of games by yourself when for only a couple hundred bucks more you could get a normal console that can play games on your 4K TV you probably already have. It's still a tough sell unless you just have the money for all these devices.
Maybe you could buy it with the idea that "VR is new, but it's going to get a lot better over time and I want to be an early adopter," but if this is the state of the company behind it right now then that seems like a stupid thing to do.
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What was/is at Menlo Park?
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fb hq
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Snapshots:
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