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Comment by LarsDu88 | Hacker News Reader

This is false. A shit ton of money can buy a ton of talent. Not Carmack level talent though, he made Doom and Quake so he's already a multi-millionaire. You need a metric ton of money to buy out Carmack, which is exactly what they did.

The problem with Meta is the same as the problem in any mega corporation at that scale -- warped incentives.

The incentive to spend all your time politicking your way up the massive corporate ladder outweighs the incentive to improve the actual product: https://mentalmodels4life.net/2021/01/04/safi-bahcalls-innov...

There's even an equation that describes this phenomenon

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If the only solid reason for people to work for a company is money, that restricts the available talent pool to a specific subset of people. And those people are wanting to maximize their pay, not the quality of their work.

> And those people are wanting to maximize their pay, not the quality of their work.

Nobody is able to hire very many people who want to optimize for the quality of their work. Few people put 110% effort into executing someone else’s vision for someone else’s profit.

This is tangential to your post but from the rumours I read Carmack is not the Rockefeller of tech you'd expect given the contributions and the impact he's made on the entire industry. While it's not plainly stated his fortune is believed to be far less than $100M. Likely less than $50M. Which is mind boggling to me given that Palmer Luckey walked away with something in the vicinity of a billion dollar windfall. It looks like Carmack always received the short end of the stick whenever he went to work for somebody else.

Hey, the equation described in the post does seems to fit the expectations for some scenarios, but as the author mentioned it would be good to work around with much more real world data.

Thanks for the link, it is a good read.

> warped incentives

Has anybody suggested "term limits" as a solution? Not that I assume they would be.

"Up or out" is perhaps a form of this - keep a stream of pressure over the org so you don't have any careerist settling in and (eventually) clogging up the productivity.

I don't know that it's actually effective at that (or if it is, that the inherent costs are worth it), but it's a bit of the reverse of most recent thinking: keep people for as long as you can if they're sufficiently useful.

That provides motivation to relentlessly promote yourself or you risk being cut...

The 'FAANG problem"...

> "Up or out"

This is what another commentor said was a likely cause for the intense focus on self-promotion and blame-dodging, since head down actual work wouldn't necessarily lead to Up, so one could end up Out.

Don't hate the player; hate the game. Personally I could not work at a place like this, as my tolerance for bullshit, politics, and wasted energy/talent is very low.

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