Gregory's Server@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.
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@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 |
@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.