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I find this letter from John Carmack interesting in that it summarizes a sentiment I've heard from literally all of the highest impact/most effective people I've talked to at large companies: You can make a big difference, but you're constantly fighting against a self-sabotaging organization. I know some fairly high impact people who aren't bothered by this kind of thing; those people tend to say things like "I try not to care too much" or "I used to get too frustrated, so now I [do less]. 24 comments
 @agocke Something I've repeatedly seen that seems similar what Carmack is referring to when he says "A good fraction of the 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" is that a team or org will want to do something in a way that cannot possibly work. Multiple people will notice this and suggest alternatives, but the team/org insists it will be fine. @agocke After some number of years, they'll realize that the approach they took can never work and will use some variant of one of the suggested approaches that can work, but they'll have wasted many person-years of effort in the meantime. And of course, there are plenty of times when teams/orgs do listen and don't take the doomed approach, or the bad approach is only 2x worse and not actually completely infeasible, etc. @agocke And, in most cases, if you want to expend enough effort, you can prevent any individual silly thing from happening, but anyone at Carmack's level, or even my level, is going to see 100x more silly stuff than they have time to fix/prevent, or that's my experience at every large company I've worked for anyway and it's also true for people I know who are effective at other big companies. @danluu yup this resonates. Unfortunately the only thing I’ve found that helps is put a lot of bright technical people in roles where they can kind of just veto plans @danluu I also wonder if, with all the talk of optimization and efficiency, there's a certain built-in resistance to a high level of optimization because it often requires invasive data collection and/or micromanagement of employee time. Amazon warehouses, for instance, are ruthlessly efficient! As a white-collar office worker, I like cutting back on stupid meetings etc, but I'm always instinctively leery of any echo of "tilt the seat down so employees don't dawdle on the toilet" @danluu Reminds me of the book Bullshit Jobs by Graeber. Large orgs tend to have a management class that's mostly in it for the perks. Efficiency is not the goal, but syphoning wealth. @danluu commenters looking at this as a single person Vs the system are missing the point. I've seen entire high performing project groups shut down due to corporate self sabotage at every level @danluu beyond frustration, I think the large time investment required to lobby inside BigCo just doesn’t add up in terms of career / personal growth. @danluu I suspect social some amount of social Darwinism is at play here, along with the expectation for engineers to "prove they are a team player". While my sample size is small, when ever I bring up organizational dysfunction, the response I get is something along the lines of "strong performers should be able to overcome institutional barriers and still get work done". Furthermore one proves one's loyalty to the company by showing a willingness to waste effort on the companies behalf. @artt Yeah, I've heard the "strong performers should be able to..." line a lot, but IMO it pretty obviously falls flat since all of the highest performers (measured by either my judgment or the company's) have the complaint, e.g., I'm told I was the 2nd highest paid person at my band at LastJob and I believe I know all of the top N and we all had the exact same complaint. At larger companies, I didn't know all of the top N, but all of the highest performing people I knew had the same complaint. @artt IMO, in terms of effectiveness, it's a major red (or a least yellow) flag for someone to give the "strong performers should be able to..." line since only someone who's ineffective and doesn't get a lot done (or actually owns the company, a la Zuck or Musk) could imagine that there are people who are persuasive enough to not run into these barriers when pushing high-impact projects. Anyone who has enough of a mental model of how orgs work to be effective couldn't have that fantasy. @danluu So true. I think in a larger sense this is, obviously, just the ill-conceived pivot to the “metaverse” focus. It’s a whole new kind of UI, one that most are uncomfortable with, and even more damning is that ppl are happy/comfortable with their current UIs.  @danluu fwiw, your writing about learning to program has so many wonderful gems about organizations & can-do & effectiveness in it. i think of this article so regularly. i forget but i think you had some other good writings on Centaur time as well, that also cover some great related points. thanks so much for sharing!! on your blog & here!! @danluu fundamentally social movers outmaneuver the best technical folks in large human organizations. Even if they're once in a generation savants that singlehandedly shaped the industry, an executive with a silver tongue will always best them. Unless they're the dictator. But that's the only exception.  @danluu Not caring too much is an art. After all, it is just a job. I found this easier to do in the private sector. Government has a bigger purpose, and at times does even more self-sabotage. Private companies just aim to make money, with some mission statement duct-taped on top. Easier not to get attached. @danluu he is John Carmack.. He is the supreme efficiency engineer. Remember he was coddling gaming engines when most of us were in High School. Resources were scarce back then. 2MB RAM. These days people are careless with resource allocation. Will bite them in the end. And then is too late.  @danluu My mind is kind of blown away at that thought. A bit saddened too... somehow He was such a pioneer in early GPU design Vague memories of early 3dfx and Voodoo cards coming back now @danluu in a specific sense, I'm glad that Facebook/Meta is less effective than they could be. They don't share my concerns and their current direction seems ill-considered. In general, large organizations suffer from similar problems. They include people with differing opinions and goals. So it's tough to get them all pulling in the same direction. Employees also realize that management is sometimes wrong and often temporary. So they won't rush to implement what they consider to be bad ideas. @danluu reward structures in large organizations also tend to lag behind their current needs. So people promoted because they're really good at X may not be able to quickly and effectively pivot to Y. |
Gregory's Server
Of course there are also people who say that this kind of thing isn't a problem for various reasons, but people who say that tend to not be very effective.
Perhaps this is just the nature of large orgs, but it seems quite unfortunate that the orgs with the most resources are constantly sabotaging themselves and that the most effective people spend a large fraction of their time fighting extremely obvious problems that don't really seem like they should exist in the first place.