
John Carmack Archive – Interviews [pdf] - Arjuna
http://fd.fabiensanglard.net/doom3/pdfs/johnc-interviews.pdf
======
Arjuna
I found these insights interesting:

"I know that most people won't believe it, but a 100x increase in income
really didn't have that big of an impact on me as a person. It is certainly
nice to be in a position where people can't exert any leverage on you, but
it's definitely not the primary focus of my life. I get to drive a Ferrari in
to work, but my day to day life is almost exactly the same as it was eight
years ago. I get up, go in to work, hopefully do some good stuff, then go
home. I'm still happy." [1]

[...]

"I feel bad for some companies out there. The founders, who are these
incredible engineers, are now directors of their departments doing management
rather than engineering. At the same time most of the people they are managing
are nowhere near as good as they were at doing the actual work. That's what I
hope never happens to me. I want to stay in the trenches working on the things
all the time. There is some benefit to sitting back, reading and researching
and getting some broader scope on it. But if you're divorced from the low
level nuts and bolts of things, like how this actually applies to the real
world, then you're just an academic. You get these huge disconnects between
what an academic can do and what somebody in production can do." [2]

[1] Page 77

[2] Page 89

~~~
YZF
Working in the "trenches" where you direct your own work and have $1B in the
bank isn't exactly the same as working in the "trenches" under the direction
of those disconnected managers that have all this leverage on you. Good
engineers, who should not be going into management, are doing so because it's
their only way out of the trenches. Founders get a choice between becoming
managers or letting someone else run their company. Can you manage a tech
company without understanding technology?

How come we're not innovating more on the structure of those companies?

~~~
coldtea
> _Can you manage a tech company without understanding technology?_

Yes. You just need to understand people, markets, and processes.

Any deep technology insight will be irrelevant -- the right advisors from your
stuff (which you'll know who they are, since, as we said above, you can
understand people -- including when they are full of shit or not), can explain
it to you "like you are five".

Taleb makes a similar point described here that extends beyond the domains in
the story:

One of the most successful traders to ever buy and sell green lumber – which
is freshly cut wood – actually had no idea what he was trading. He spent his
entire career trading green lumber career believing the product was just wood
painted green, and not newly cut trees. His ignorance of the product had no
impact on his ability to make money trading it. The term “Green Lumber
Fallacy” was coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his excellent book
‘Antifragile’, where he outlined a second similar situation: a star Swiss
Franc trader who’s inability to locate Switzerland on the map didn’t hinder
his ability to make money trading its currency.

[https://www.pinnacle.com/en/betting-articles/betting-
psychol...](https://www.pinnacle.com/en/betting-articles/betting-
psychology/the-green-lumber-fallacy#height)

~~~
TeMPOraL
There's a flipside to this though - this is how you get shit and useless
products. What you (or Taleb) are describing here is a money-making
specialist. A person who can play the market and management game well. That's
almost entirely orthogonal to creating the best product, or doing something
valuable for society.

The argument I'm trying to make here is very similar to the one about MBAs
ruining companies. You get people who can play the market game so well their
incentives get completely misaligned with what the rest of the company would
like (and what the customers would like).

And in general - as a society we like free markets and competitions because
they're supposed to give us a spectrum of products, from cheap but good enough
to expensive and high quality, in an efficient way. But people who are _too_
good at optimizing for the way markets work can make money without giving us
the result we expect, thus ruining the very reason we want capitalist economy.

------
thiagoharry
I liked this:

CARMACK: - The intersection of people that run Quake on Linux, SPARC and Light
is probably a dozen people. But if it's just a matter of compiling, we'll do
it anyway.

HOOK: -And we do this, not because it makes any particularly good business
sense, but because it's cool. All this is an ego thing. The more platforms you
port to, the more people are playing your game. And its a cool thing that
someone can say: "Yeah, I was playing Quake 2 on a SPARC Linux Box."

CARMACK: - It doesn't make good business case, but it helps us to be better
programmers.

------
j_s
The DRM-free "Masters of Doom" audiobook is currently (expires July 10-ish)
included in the "Hackers, Gamers & Geeks" Humble Books Bundle for $15, along
with a bunch of other video game history audiobooks, including "Prepare to
Meet Thy Doom: And More True Gaming Stories" also by by David Kushner at the
$8 level.

[https://www.humblebundle.com/books/hackers-gamers-geeks-
audi...](https://www.humblebundle.com/books/hackers-gamers-geeks-audiobooks)

~~~
icelancer
Damn. Really wish these had eBooks as well. Podcasts/audiobooks are really
tough for me to get into. I cannot process spoken word nearly as well as the
written one, and I get far too easily distracted when trying to listen to
audiobooks.

Still might buy it since Kushner's new MoD book seems to be audio only from
what I can see.

~~~
tudorizer
Erm, there's a printed version:
[http://amzn.to/2tkRUI4](http://amzn.to/2tkRUI4)

------
zurn
Actual link: [http://fd.fabiensanglard.net/doom3/pdfs/johnc-
interviews.pdf...](http://fd.fabiensanglard.net/doom3/pdfs/johnc-
interviews.pdf#page117)

And it's press interviewing Carmack, not job interviews conducted by him.

------
typedef_struct
> As far as unreal goes, we can’t compete with an unreleased product, because
> a non existent product does everything you dream of and has no faults

Oh, Star Citizen...

------
quakeguy
This is what Quake looks like today:

[https://twitter.com/SimsOCallaghan/status/875934261320220672](https://twitter.com/SimsOCallaghan/status/875934261320220672)

(Yes, it is Quake1 in a modified OGL engine)

------
blinkingled
> John Carmack: You wind up getting this sense of partisanship or just taking
> sides. It’s human nature, I suppose, but when it gets away from a strict
> technical discussion, then you start getting your ”army of followers.” I
> suppose that’s part of having influence, but it’s not a part that I’m
> particularly comfortable with.

This is so pervasive (politics, technology) and damaging (less so in technical
world but there's still the price of stunted intelligence to pay) that I wish
along with me more people in the world would read this and pledge to making
every discussion interesting and productive.

~~~
ksk
Why do you believe its less in the technical world?

~~~
smitherfield
One (not necessarily me) could argue that there is (or, at least, ought to be
if people took their egos out of it) usually a clear and objective way to
resolve technical disputes, while the same is not at all true of (parent
comment's other example) political disputes.

~~~
ksk
I think that in-spite of being programmers, we've deluded ourselves into
believing that we can be hyper objective. The practical human factors IMHO,
always overpower theoretical technical decisions, and bring you back into the
realm of politics/social issues. But that is a very large topic for discussion
and comments won't do it justice.

------
pjmlp
How professional game developers, like Carmack with his OpenGL love, actually
see the whole relevance of graphic APIs.

"John Carmack: Its still OpenGL, although we obviously use a D3D-ish API [on
the Xbox 360], and CG on the PS3. Its interesting how little of the technology
cares what API you're using and what generation of the technology you're on.
You've got a small handful of files that care about what API they're on, and
millions of lines of code that are agnostic to the platform that they're on."

------
thrillgore
While not directly linked, this video
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OipJYWhMi3k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OipJYWhMi3k))
about Quake got my attention last night and I found it riveting regarding its
technical aspects, development history, and cultural impact.

------
pfarnsworth
John Carmack was my programming god, back in the day. I would devour
everything he wrote, which if I remember correctly, was on Usenet, but I'm so
old my memory fails me now. Recently I found out that one of my friends was
working with him at Oculus via Facebook, I was jealous beyond belief.

------
kchoudhu
Carmack on Java: "I like the language"

Your move, language hipsters.

~~~
koffiezet
As a dev that moved into a sysadmin role who has to deploy stuff from our Java
and C++ devs. As dev I used to like the language itself, but not the
frameworks.

These days I seriously dislike the runtime with all it's tuning it requires,
memory bloat, ... The absolute worst however is most Java developer's complete
disconnect with and ignorance of the actual deployment environment/target. I
actually kept a score-count for a while for "the server is not configured
correctly, it works on my laptop" actually being true and not a developer
error. Was asked to remove the sign though since 'it didn't improve the
working atmosphere'.

A few pointers for Java devs: please don't use hard-coded paths, certainly
when you develop on windows and I need to deploy it on a *nix system, Java
will not automagically fix that because it's supposed to be 'multi-platform'.
No, XML files are not 'easy' or 'practical' to configure stuff, and I
certainly don't want to use java cli tools to manipulate them. Oh and don't
rewrite your base config files when some misc hardly documented API was used
to deploy some application in your web framework. I don't like it that it
removes every single comment from that file, and my config management has to
do a lot of hacky ugly stuff so it doesn't treat that as a config change from
it's pov. Also, I don't 'just' want to use java library org.X.Y to talk to
that hardly documented deployment API. No the database isn't slow because it's
misconfigured or doesn't have enough resources, it's because some framework
you use to access the database generates a monstrous 30-page SQL query with a
few hundred JOINS. Oh and please stop using SOAP when you expect me to talk to
it.

I can keep on going - this goes on for a while, and that's only partially the
language's fault - but sadly, the stdlib and community encourages some of that
undesired behavior. You can however write pretty clean and nice stuff when
avoiding large enterpricy frameworks with all the
FactoryFactoryFactoryFactoryFactoryFactories where XML is king, but in
reality, most Java projects end up using them.

------
paines
It sounds like he is a development machine, in a good sense. I wonder if he
has ever blocks, like mental or creativity ...

------
fredsanford
Has it really been ~9 years since Carmack did a technical/game dev type of
interview?

Time is just flying past...

------
teilo
Drinking game time. A shot for every "when it's done."

~~~
4rt
and one for every time you suspect johnc said "Ayum" while thinking

------
kodt
Team5150 the old Tribes clan?

------
nadim
Gold+. Thx for posting.

------
dang
Url changed from
[https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/880204928811126784](https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/880204928811126784),
which points to this.

------
1001101
[PDF] decorator would be appreciated.

~~~
dang
Ah yes, added. Thanks.

