Comment by baby | Hacker News Reader

Comment by baby | Hacker News Reader

I see a lot of negative comment on the other thread and on twitter so I feel the need to comment as well. It’d be great to get the perspective from someone who worked there, but I can offer mine as an outsider (worked on a different team at fb).

Back then, I would religiously read every workplace posts from Carmack (that wasn’t hidden to other orgs). I loved everything he was saying, I always found it really insightful. It also seemed clear (much before he went part time) that he was saying that on the outskirt of the project.

There’s a big culture of flatness at fb (and now meta). No titles are public, and you’re supposed to respect everybody’s opinion in the room. You’re supposed to lead without authority: by convincing people. You’re also quite free to explore things, as long as you can make a case for it.

There’s upsides and downsides to such environment. You can really multiply yourself if you create trust and clout. On the other hand, authority and a big title doesn’t always gives you room for directing a project.

I was always wondering how effective Carmack was going to be in such an environment. He doesn’t seem to be the type to lead, but I can see this happening in a small team, but an entire org that’s growing extremely quickly? For the kind of things he wanted to happen you’d have to make sure to hire people who cared about exactly the same kind of stuff, which doesn’t really happen when you’re in a diverse environment. Extremists must then spend their time pulling the group in one direction or the other.

I worked at Meta. Yea, there was a promoted culture of flatness, but that only applied to the IC side. Within engineering there are separate levels but everyone has the same title "Software engineer" so that (supposedly) level shouldn't be a factor in whose argument is correct. In practice, everyone knows who's high-vs-low level, so it's mostly a charade.

On the management side, there are clear titles, reporting hierarchies, and areas of ownership. They decide what gets prioritized, staffed, and shipped. As an IC, you can make technical decisions and recommend product ideas, but you'll never ship functionality to users without PM, design, and eng leadership approval.

Within RL, like everywhere else at Meta, there are VPs and Directors whose job was to set strategy and create roadmaps. RL had a multi-year roadmap aggregating roadmaps from all the sub-orgs within RL. There's no world where a single IC, even at Carmack's level, is going to subvert that hierarchy. The job of a senior IC is to influence and check their management counterparts to make sure they're prioritizing the right things. Clearly he wasn't able to do that to the extent he wanted.

When I was there a couple years ago, I looked into joining RL a couple times but got advice from coworkers that the rotating carousel of leadership led to changing roadmaps/priorities, so it was a thrashy place to be.

IC? RL?

Individual contributor aka not a manger likely an engineer

Reality labs (I think)

IC = Independent Contributor

RL = Reality Labs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Labs)

> You’re supposed to lead without authority

John seems to be particularly calling out that he was not able to influence the people with high enough rank to make decisions. So it sounds like he at least thought there was an authority structure there wasn't as flat as you describe.

Something that popped into my mind is the role of Linus in the Linux Kernel development. Imagine how things would be without him? Or if a bunch of business exec ran things?

A lot of millennials value freedom of choice and open collaboration ad nauseam, but this is the danger of too many voices—nothing gets done. No singular purpose. No authority—or rather, no respect for authority. The reality is: we are not all equal. Some people are just better at what they do than others. Perhaps we should listen to what they say?

But that’s how politics goes—some schmucks who have no idea nor vision, nor experience, nor know-how, rise up on the backs of engineers who do all the work. Typically out of insecurity or over-ambition they trample on-up.

And who would want to deal with the cutthroat bullshit of trying to deal with these people?

Go Carmack—create something amazing with your startup. Meta will rot away in the next ten years because someone else will invent a better VR headset. Just like Linus helped invent a better OS—free to use, open to collaborate, with vision and focus. With attention-to-detail and quality-engineering as a first-class citizen.

No need to bash millennials here. He also admitted he could have pushed more but decided to code instead.

He wasn’t talking with senior managers and directors but almost certainly VP level and CxO

Valve is a great example of how this doesn't work in practice. Jeri Ellsworth got fired and revealed that the supposedly flat hierarchy at Valve is really composed of informal cliques - with the most influential groups having a direct line to the CEO/

Kinda what happened to communism in Russia, if you think about it

As humans we do have built-in hardware for forming informal cliques, so this could be seen as leveraging our built-in strengths (although you have to consciously work against some of the built-in cognitive biases that people have so it might be a risky thing, maybe not worth it).

How is it even remotley like communism in USSR? Russian empire had the same governance structure since the time of the Golden Horde to present day e.g. very hierarchal top down ...

Right there in the title - Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) Soviets are worker's councils and the individual republics are supposed to have some degree of autonomy on paper. For at least a couple of months in 1917, some amount of collective decision making did happen, although (as you stated) with virtually all Russian governments, it quickly devolved into one-man personality cult enforced by brutality and the machinations of the NKVD.

The flat org of fb I described is not really flat the way Valve is. Valve is truly flat from what I understand, whereas the one at facebook is not but encourage people to behave like it is.

I think I read that it's not flat since a few years back anyway

Can we really expect an employee who was fired to paint the most accurate picture though? What are the thoughts of folks that left on good or neutral terms?

This is an old observation: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

I would argue it does work in practise, at least with a higher success rate than a formal authority hierarchy.

There is always an authority structure in these kinds of companies. I'm personally familiar with Google, but this description of Facebook makes it sound similar...

The upside is that people, in theory, don't need to wait to be promoted to (attempt to) have an outsized influence on what actually happens on their team, in their org, etc. The downside is that the "real" power/influence structure can be a more nebulous/social game, rather than something concrete that is diagrammed out in a visible org structure. It was often said at Google that you get promoted to level X after already doing work at that level, which implies that the people with influence are running around influencing/leading before they've been anointed with an official title that "gives" them authority.

Reading Carmack's letter, it sounds like he consciously chose to prioritize his personal programming/engineering work over his social/influence/leadership at Facebook. In all my observations, past a certain level, you kinda have to choose one or the other. Both are valid choices.

> authority structure there wasn't as flat as you describe.

It never is. In the absence of formal authority, people will unconsciously build an ad hoc structure on their own.

See also: The Tyranny of Structurelessness https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

I feel like Metas 'flatness' is revealing itself as suboptimal now that its stock is tanking. While the product is generating money and productivity doesn't really matter, the organization can afford to have masses of engineers doing not much of anything. But when things are going bad and clear top down organization is needed, then this culture suddenly turns into massive friction and might end up killing the company.

I don't claim to understand corporate structures or the best way to organize a large group of employees but metas problems seem to stem more from betting on the wrong thing which seemed like a decision that came from the top.

The stock tanking really have no relation with the performance or the engineering happening inside.

Top down organisation is slow, bureaucratic, and often is bottlenecked for decisions. Inevitably, unless you have monopoly or other form of stickiness, you are quickly outcompeted by the newer nimble organisation. (Hence why companies spend a lot on the stickiness aspect, e.g. Word proprietary format)

Not saying that “flat” works better (or scales). What does work better (with some other downsides) is a distributed system of companies (each internal company operating independently). Still lots of politics around getting the “budget”, still plenty of places to fall down with cross cutting concerns and integrations. Much like a microservice arch vs a monolith, the trade offs can be beneficial at scale.

I’m not sure if Meta is trying to run this way.

I don’t understand what the problem would be for him if this was the environment. He’s respected as a technologist and had strong opinions on technology. He’s not merely a tech. savant without social skills.

Again, this assumes that this was what the environment was like. Not that it was just like that in name only.

I think he probably expected to be able to lead by authority, and tbh maybe he could have been such a steve jobs-like leader? But who knows. It’s also possible that there were much more talented people than him, not as public or beloved as him, who ended up winning technical decisions.

Large organizations all have all sorts of issues, and from the outside the devices that RL released were huge technologicL successes. I think we should acclaim the progress we’ve made so far in the field.

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