I find it astounding that this could be true for someone as senior and respected as Carmack. Is it because he's working in a hardware division? What takes so damn long?
Side note - its interesting how Carmack has come out and publicly bashed Meta so much. I guess you can do that when you're in his position.
Source: worked at Meta on Quest system software with Carmack 2018-2021
Maybe because they suck and deserve to be criticized?
> Isn’t staying quiet the right thing to do?
It's certainly the easier thing to do. It's a sad world we live in where being 'professional' means being dishonest.
Likely? Certainly from all appearances from the outside there are many legitimate bones to pick about Meta's organizational sclerosis, but part of this is structural to the product itself.
"I can fix the image quality issues with X relatively easily, I know exactly what needs to be done"
elicits (rightfully!)
"We operate on an intensely compute-constrained device where every cycle matters. Over-consumption of compute causes battery life to degrade significantly and the device to become uncomfortably warm to wear. How much compute will this solution cost?"
Then you have to balance the additional compute with drawing down compute somewhere else. Maybe the tracking camera algorithms can be optimized to consume less compute, which opens room for additional usage elsewhere, but now you've introduced a blocking dependency to delivering this enhancement.
Even in a well-functioning organization this prevent shipping as fast as a startup. Part of why startups ship fast isn't just organizational, it's because the products are simpler with fewer technical constraints.
Hardware (particularly embedded hardware - which Meta Quests are not precisely, but are pretty close) presents intense levels of constraints that most people who write code on servers (or even PCs) don't often appreciate.
More like a phone from 2020. The Samsung Galaxy S20 base model has 8GB of RAM (the S20FE has 6GB)