John Carmack Quits Meta, Bemoans Deep-Rooted Inefficiencies At the Company

The experienced techie said Meta is highly inefficient by as much as 50%.

December 19, 2022

Meta consulting CTO John Carmack has stepped down from his role to focus on building his startup, Keen Technologies. On his way out, the renowned programmer expressed unhappiness with how things are going at Meta’s VR division, adding to the company’s woes.

John Carmack confirmed his exit from Meta through a post on Facebook to avoid selective framing of his departure after multiple agencies reported it. However, Carmack’s postOpens a new window , the same one he posted internally within Meta that was leaked to the press, does criticize the company’s internal workings.

Carmack is leaving almost a decade after joining Oculus as CTO back in 2013, a year before its acquisition by Meta  (then Facebook). Since 2019, he stepped away from his full-time CTO role to that of a consulting CTO, dedicating 20% of his time to the social networking giant.

The experienced techie said Meta is highly inefficient by as much as 50%. “We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander efforts. There is no way to sugar coat this; I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy,” Carmack wrote.

Carmack’s parting note explains why Meta is one of the Silicon Valley-based companies that, in preceding months, has had to undergo some of the most extensive organization-wide layoffs in 2022. Meta offloaded approximately 11,000 employees in November 2022.

Carmack is a titan of the industry, having co-created popular games such as Doom and Quake. In the past ten years, he has contributed to and successfully propelled Oculus devices as some of the best-in-class VR products, which he describes as “something pretty close to The Right Thing.”

“It has been a struggle for me,” Carmack addedOpens a new window . “I have a voice at the highest levels here, so it feels like I should be able to move things, but I’m evidently not persuasive enough. A good fraction of things I complain about eventually turn my way after a year or two passes and evidence piles up, but I have never been able to kill stupid things before they cause damage, or set a direction and have a team actually stick to it.”

See More: Why Balance Is the Key to Successful Scaling

Carmack noted that VR is still poised to make a difference for people, with Meta in the best position to make that happen. However, he will no longer be a part of a work culture wherein production-level GPU utilization of a meager 5% is an accepted norm.

He has previously expressed dissatisfaction with Meta killing off Oculus Go, the low-cost alternative to the $1,500 Oculus Quest 2. At Meta Connect in October 2022, Carmack didn’t hide his dissatisfaction about Meta’s metaverse progress either.

“Last year I said that I’d be disappointed if we weren’t having Connect in Horizon this year. This here, this isn’t really what I meant. Me being an avatar on-screen on a video for you is basically the same thing as being on a video,” Carmack said during the introduction.

Meta CTO Andrez Bosworth tweeted:

Meta is currently reeling from low ad spending, contributing to a declined revenue, regulatory scrutiny, fines, and lawsuit for privacy violations, and a year-to-date decline of ~65% in its market capitalization.

Last year during the company’s Q3 earnings call, Meta allocated $10 billionOpens a new window to Facebook Reality Labs, its VR and metaverse division. “I feel sick to my stomach thinking about that much money being spent,” Carmack said in a podcast interviewOpens a new window but added, “it’s not just gonna vanish; the work’s going in. I just wish all those resources could be applied more effectively.”

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Image source: Shutterstock

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Sumeet Wadhwani
Sumeet Wadhwani

Asst. Editor, Spiceworks Ziff Davis

An earnest copywriter at heart, Sumeet is what you'd call a jack of all trades, rather techs. A self-proclaimed 'half-engineer', he dropped out of Computer Engineering to answer his creative calling pertaining to all things digital. He now writes what techies engineer. As a technology editor and writer for News and Feature articles on Spiceworks (formerly Toolbox), Sumeet covers a broad range of topics from cybersecurity, cloud, AI, emerging tech innovation, hardware, semiconductors, et al. Sumeet compounds his geopolitical interests with cartophilia and antiquarianism, not to mention the economics of current world affairs. He bleeds Blue for Chelsea and Team India! To share quotes or your inputs for stories, please get in touch on sumeet_wadhwani@swzd.com
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