John Carmack Calls It Quits at Meta Due To Utter Frustration

Hi, I’m Rick Barron, your host, and welcome to That’s Life, I Swear

About four weeks ago, John Carmack, who was the chief technology officer of Oculus, which Meta bought, called it quits and decided to leave. His reasoning for leaving? He said, [the project is working at] “half the effectiveness” and has “a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort.”

Let’s jump into this 

After more than eight years at the company, John Carmack, a pioneer of virtual reality technology, had enough. John is known as a programming savant and technology genius and played a key role in shaping Meta's recent direction.

So, who is John Carmack? If you have teenage kids who play video games, I’m sure they can tell you a lot about John.

John Carmack and DOOM. Courtesy of: Facebook

He is a well-known computer programmer and video game developer who has worked on several highly successful games and game engines. He is best known for his work on the Doom and Quake series of games, which have influenced the development of the first-person shooter genre.

Carmack has been involved in the video game industry for about 30 years and has made significant contributions to the field. He is known for his computer graphics and game engine development expertise, and his work has impacted the video game industry.

John Carmack. Courtesy of: DCEO magazine

Carmack was the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Oculus VR before Meta (then operating under the Facebook name) acquired the company in 2013.

While there he championed Meta’s technology that specialized in augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) products and services. His work also covered the creation of the Meta 2 AR headset, which allows users to see and interact with virtual objects in the real world.

John’s departure doesn’t leave a good impression on the Zuckerberg’s metaverse dream to become a reality, at least not right away. He was one of the most influential voices leading the development of V.R. headsets at Meta. John made a decision to stay with Facebook after Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive, decided to shift the company last year to focus on the metaverse and renamed Facebook as Meta.

I believe that Zuckerberg’s relentless push to pour dollars into the metaverse is so he doesn’t have to be reliant on Apple and Alphabet going forward. Through its new privacy update, Apple Inc. has effectively declared war on Meta Platforms, Inc., which relies on advertising for most of its revenues.

Google also delivered the killing blow to Meta's future advertising revenues, when it announced similar changes to its privacy terms for all Android phones.

Meta Quest Pro. Courtesy of: VRScout

Charging full steam into VR and the metaverse is a giant leap Zuckerberg is taking to deal with the monkey wrench that Apple and Google threw at him. While Meta has made some significant progress, John Carmack's recent exit didn’t help and is another painful reminder of the tech giant's struggles attempting to blaze a new trail.

It just came down to absolute frustration drove John Carmack to end his time with Meta Platforms. It was on his Facebook page that he called it quits. 

In his comments, he expressed and understood Meta was in the midst of transitioning from a social networking company to one focused on the immersive world of the metaverse. No easy task and quite a leap in strategies. 

While his comments may have sounded damaging, they weren’t related to any individual person or persons he worked with, or decisions made above him. His quitting focused on his idea of optimization itself, a structural and systemic issue.  

John was watching a company operating at half its potential, not to mention the absurdity of throwing a lot of people and resources and having nothing to show for their efforts. It was taking two steps forward and four backward. 

Understand that John’s feedback is not someone in isolation. Facebook is no longer the dream work environment it once was. According to a poll taken in early 2022 by Glassdoor, Meta Platforms dropped 36 spots to number 47 on annual ranking of the best places to work in 2022. This was the company’s lowest ranking in12 years since it made the list, and comes after the company ranked 11th in 2021. 

Meta employees blame unwanted public scrutiny, lack of action from leadership, unraveled structure and questions about the company’s future for the lowered ranking of the company as an employer. The rankings are based on anonymous employee feedback from thousands of companies.

An example of this downturn was shared via a podcast interview in August of 2022. During the course of the podcast, when Meta reported a $10 billion loss within the division housing its augmented reality and virtual reality initiatives made John, and I quote “sick to my stomach.” End quote.

He added that the environment at Meta was chained to a bloated bureaucracy and dealing with persistent concerns about diversity and privacy.

John Carmack and Mark Zuckerberg. Courtesy of: Reddit

John tried to be a voice of reason calling out some of the directions Meta was going with some of their management decisions. He called it like it was and became a dissenting voice in the Meta work environment. John wasn’t timid when it came to criticize the decision-making and direction set forth by Zuckerberg and Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer. 

With his background, John felt he had a voice at the highest levels at Meta. He thought his constructive input would sway some of the bad decision-making, but it became obvious to him, he was not persuasive enough.

With the metaverse losses mounting, Facebook and services such as Instagram are facing a downturn in advertising that brings in most of the company's revenue. The decline has been exasperated by recession fears, tougher competition from other social networking services such as TikTok, and the new privacy controls on Apple's iPhone that have made it tougher to track people's interests to help sell ads.

Take all these challenges and look at the dollars lost, and Meta's stock losing approximately two-thirds of its value in 2022; and you’re looking at a value of about $575 billion erased in shareholder wealth.

Supernatural VR game. Courtesy of: Meta

As I was writing this podcast, I saw an article in the newspaper where John and Mark Zuckerberg were in court discussing the acquisition of Within Unlimited. 

The court hearing was centered on the Federal Trade Commission’s attempt to block Meta’s purchase of Within Unlimited, the virtual reality start-up behind a fitness game called Supernatural. The agency has argued that the tech giant will snuff out the competition in the developing metaverse if it is allowed to complete the deal. The arguments on both sides are still ongoing.

What can we learn from this story?  What’s the takeaway?

In my book, Mark Zuckerberg jumped the gun on the Metaverse. Meta’s earnings have been hit hard by its spending on the metaverse and its slowing growth in social networking and digital advertising. In July, the Silicon Valley company posted its first sales decline as a public company. As a means to cut their losses, Meta  laid off about 11,000 employees, or about 13 percent of its work force, in what amounted to the company’s most significant job cuts.

Does John’s departure spell doom and gloom for Meta. I don’t think it will but it doesn’t help the cause.

When John Carmack left, he was only working part-time at Meta. Nevertheless, the disappointment he expressed in his resignation can’t be that he was alone in his thinking having these doubts and reservations about the future.  

It magnifies the questions looming over Zuckerberg's efforts to become as dominant in virtual reality as Facebook has been in social networking since starting the service nearly 20 years, and now making an abrupt turnaround in strategy.

While Zuckerberg continues pouring money into Meta, John announced in August that his artificial intelligence firm, a startup, Keen Technologies, had raised $20 million. I believe John will once again enjoy going to the office and working in an environment where employees can disagree with management decisions for the greater good.

Well, there you go. That's life, I swear.

For further information regarding the material covered in this episode, I invite you to visit my website, that you can find on either Apple Podcasts/iTunes or Google Podcasts, for show notes calling out key pieces of content mentioned and the episode transcript.

As always, I thank you for listening. 

Be sure to subscribe here or wherever you get your podcast, so you don't miss an episode. See you soon.