Hacker News Reader

The man is clearly smart, but it's posts that this that show he had no business in a leadership role at Facebook. When he left, he cited low GPU utilization as an "offensive" metric. These skills were great for writing early 3D game engines, but not for developing consumer VR.

View on HN

I'm frankly curious about the thought train that led you from "Carmack makes a technical post about gamma correction" to "he can't lead in a tech company"

He misses the forest for the trees. It's not this one case, but it's a pattern with him. He's not wrong about these things, but when he calls them out rather than calling out more meaningful, high-level issues.

They were only using 5% capacity of their datacenter GPUs. They could have trained their deep learning models close to 20X more, etc. He mainly just said it was a signal of their inefficiency as an organization and was a final straw, not a sole reason. He detailed many other major misallocations of resources throughout his time there.

But it's the wrong straw. The reason people played with their Oculus for a day, then left it on the shelf wasn't insufficient model training.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com