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Comment by daenz | Hacker News Reader

What in the world was Carmack doing, working on another company's project, using your current company's time and resources? Don't get me wrong, the guy is a genius, and I love nearly everything he has a hand in, but you would think that with his level of seniority, some alarm bells would have gone off in his head.

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Some alarm bells probably did go off, but they were probably silenced fairly quickly with something along the lines of, "but this is really cool and I want to work on it. Plus, it's not like my employer is actively working on a VR that I'd be competing with."

And at the end of the day, Carmack isn't the one who is out $500M, is he?

In retrospect, he came out smelling like roses.

He is personally out $150m, according to the article.

That seems like a lot, I didn't think he was worth that much, maybe I'm undervaluing his net worth. Is there a value for that anywhere?

Well, he had to stop playing with rockets as he was running out of FU money...

He presumably got a sizeable chunk of Oculus shares when he joined as CTO, and those would have been converted to a valuable amount of Facebook equity during the $3bn buyout.

Kind of irrelevant though, as the article is wrong, and it's actually Luckey and Iribe who are personally liable, and not Carmack.

The Variety article says Carmack but the TechCrunch article says Iribe. I'm having trouble finding the actual source.

The court documents say Iribe.

Carmack took his emails with him on a USB stick (which Zenimax's lawyer called "10,000 confidential documents") but the jury didn't award any damages for that.

There's a story in Masters of Doom where Carmack and Romero do just that. If I recall correctly, they would take company (Softdisk I believe) computers at night because they were more powerful than their home computers, and use them to develop their own games. I think they even worked on their own games on company time. I might be getting the details wrong on that one, but sounds like Carmack dgaf (or just doesn't think about how these things could potentially be wrong/misaligned).

LOVE THIS BOOK! And you are correct, they indeed "borrowed" the machines.

Carmack is way more of a badass punk than his demeanor makes him out to be. When he was 14, he got sentenced to a year in juvie for stealing his school's Apple IIs. He broke in using thermite. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack#Early_life

I believe they settled it by paying some royalties on Commander Keen.

A lot of times Carmack just wants to get shit done. At Oculus he has worked on both the Minecraft code and the Netflix code both for VR clients, both (I believe, I know for sure for Minecraft at least from some talks) with MS and Netflix retaining full ownership of the code.

Maybe they have some "off the record" agreements to avoid anti-trust--Minecraft still hasn't officially come to Vive.

They also made a number of "free" games that were published by SoftDisk. This was all pre-modern software era though. If that happened today, it would end up very similarly to how the Occulus case ended up.

I love how it's assumed, taken as axiom, instead of absurdity, that it's even possible for a company to own a individual's time and mind by contract.

Believe me, I'm on your side about that. However, the reports stated he used company resources.

John was able to do the demo at E3 due to his employment at Zenimax, Carmack used company resources to work on the product, and Carmack was able to source talent from zenimax due to his employment at the company.

None of this has anything to do with Zenimax owning his "mind" or "time." It's about Carmack using company resources to enable Oculus. This becomes even more concerning when you consider that Carmack was one of their most senior, if not THE most senior engineer at the company. He's compensated handsomely under the assumption that any great ideas he has will end up with the company. This is similar to executive compensation strategies and carries with it very similar assumptions. The situation is a little more than some ordinary employee exploring their hobby and getting lucky.

This is like a CEO getting hired, being awarded a multi-hundred million dollar contract, not doing a single thing for the company that hired him, advertising for a competitor, leaving once his contract is up and also convincing numerous other executives to leave with him at the same time. That's extremely unethical in my opinion.

How much all that is worth is debatable, but the court seems to think it was worth $500M.

he enabled Zenimax's game to run on an oculus.

zenimax didn't have a VR headset to sell, or plans to make one

Imagine if this story was about carmack getting access to a playstation 4, and helping improve it and doing a demo of Doom on PS4.

that...is what he is supposed to do!

> Imagine if this story was about carmack getting access to a playstation 4, and helping improve it and doing a demo of Doom on PS4.

Your allegory is ending a bit too soon and missing some nuance: Imagine if this story was about carmack getting access to a Playstation 5 prototype, and helping improve it and doing a demo of Doom on PS 5. He then leaves Zenimax to work for Sony - on the PS 5

Yeah, people are forgetting that Carmack wasn't the janitor at Zeinmax; he was one of the biggest, if not THE biggest reason why Zeinmax acquired ID in the first place

that was the conclusion i jumped to, but i realized that this is not actually the case if i read the details right.

What, like writing GLQuake for 3dfx cards?

He was a game programmer. He was porting his company's game to upcoming hardware. I fail to see what's even a tiny bit inappropriate about that.

> What in the world was Carmack doing, working on another company's project, using your current company's time and resources?

The same thing he was doing when starting Id software working for another company a couple of decades ago.

Read the stories about how he wanted to work on the Occulus version of Minecraft, and how focused he was on making sure he could do that. There didn't appear to be much caution there, either.

Honestly, Carmack sounds like he is smitten with VR/Oculus, at least in the earlier videos.

I don't think he was treating this very rationally...it was like love

I don't think Carmack works that way. All he really cares about professionally (I'm not talking about his personal life or rocketry) is doing good work and pushing his code to the limits of the field. Oculus hardware was a big coding challenge without much marked territory or set rules for Carmack, so that's probably the only thing he was thinking about while working.

If he does, he's come a long way from the John Carmack that consistently open-sourced his 3D engines and followed up with developers who failed to abide by the GPL [0].

(I don't think he works the way you describe at all).

[0] https://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/finger.pl?id=1&time=200002...

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