
The Creator of 'Doom' Is Now A Facebook Employee - antonius
http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/25/the-creator-of-doom-is-now-a-facebook-employee/
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daviding
There's been a flurry of threads, and I've not seen this discussed. As a huge
fan of Carmack and a believer in VR, the acquisition is interesting, in that:

\- John Carmack's OR work was not just on the mechanism of VR in terms of the
screens, latency, but also on an embedded operating system to best drive the
experience. The fact that Zuckerberg in the investment call mentioned this as
a 'new device platform' (not desktop, not mobile) could be taken somewhat
literally. This could be an interesting way for FB to become part of a new
embedded platform, written to drive these displays. This Facebook Display OS
could be next years press froth that was the Facebook Phone OS. While AR /
Glass is not much like OR, the platform might be Mark's play here, just as
much as a 'seems like a good long bet'.

\- John fairly recently discussed how Armadillo was really not something he
could put much more money in. Fairly quickly he has got into a situation that
(post golden handcuffs) he could seriously restart this. While it's funny to
imagine Zuckerberg/Carmack in code review meetings :) the reality if the
situation might be that this OR adventure is big-picture just John's way back
home to Armadillo in a few years. Needs must and all that.

I'm still internalizing the news (as a dev/purchaser of both DK1 and preorder
DK2) but some things do seem apparent today:

\- This is probably a good time for one of the VR also-rans to do a 'Oculus
Rift kickerstarter V2' on this news. Rightly or wrongly there's now a huge
need for a new white knight in VR that could be tapped.

\- What JC does/says now is a barometer for a lot of people in the OR
community.

\- OR's biggest pitfall will now be loss of focus. There are now so many
distractions, from metaverses to HR noise.

Personally I think FB will be hands-off, and this is not a disaster but then
my main excitement is really just on getting to CV1 as soon as possible,
regardless of who owns the most stock, and today's news helps that.

~~~
kryptiskt
Carmack has started tweeting a bit about the deal, including:

"I have a deep respect for the technical scale that FB operates at. The
cyberspace we want for VR will be at this scale."

"For the record, I am coding right now, just like I was last week.I expect the
FB deal will avoid several embarrassing scaling crisis for VR."

~~~
fennecfoxen
Right, I see. Carmack sold out so he can fulfill his adolescent fantasies of
being the programmer behind _Snow Crash_ 's metaverse.

Unfortunately, all it's going to be is a lame Facebook-branded knockoff of
_Second Life_.

~~~
Karunamon
I wasn't aware working for a different company implies "selling out".

Get some perspective, please.

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pdq
This reminds me of when Jamie Zawinski (of Netscape fame) became an AOL
employee:
[http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/aol.html](http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/aol.html)

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downer76
If Carmack obtained any sort of options or shares in Oculus stock prior to
this deal, this is likely to be quite a hefty payday for him, no?

Just goes to show that his business sense was dead on, and he aligned his
position with an organization he instinctively perceived as valuable _before_
it's value exploded. It's probably safe to say, though, that his participation
in the company also augmented the perception of its value, by his association
acting as a defacto endorsement.

~~~
ucha
He joined less than a year ago. Assuming he received a standard options
package, I doubt his options vested.

~~~
gstar
It's pretty much inconceivable that he'd have a "standard options package"

He would have been courted, offered a substantial slice of equity, and his
contribution and membership of the leadership team (he's the CTO!) would have
significantly contributed to the valuation.

He'd have made out huge-time.

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joshontheweb
If we see a virtual facebook before a virtual fps I'm going to pull my hair
out.

~~~
baby
There are already plenty of fps you can try on the Oculus SDK.

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rschmitty
April 1st is still many days away... "Teh Carmack" is up there with the least
likely people I'd imaging being employed by Facebook.

~~~
devNoise
With the recent agism article, I get the impression that most of the Facebook
employees would think Carmack is to old for their "culture".

~~~
ArcticCelt
Not enough of a brogrammer for their standards.

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
As an engineer at Facebook, I will say that couldn't be further from the
truth. Every reaction I've seen has been overwhelmingly positive, full of
amazement and excitement at the chance to meet or work with one of our
greatest idols.

~~~
mikeash
Come now, your facts clearly have no place in this discussion.

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mianos
What a legend. Amazing that the previous company would not listen to him. I
guess it's the old case of the tech lead not being compatible with the MBA
playbook so he left. Maybe Harvard should update their list of 'When these
people speak listen' as it's obviously way way out of date.

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jeffool
While a surprising turn to me that he ends up at Facebook... I think a lot of
people forget that id Software sold to Bethesda in 2009. He's known as one of
the most independent game developers, but he's been "an employee" for some
time now.

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anaphor
I'm in awe of the clickbaity title here. I seriously doubt Carmack is going to
start hacking in PHP or something.

~~~
scott_karana
Facebook doesn't _just_ do web development and analytics.

Their datacenters alone are big enough to warrant hardware engineers for their
custom servers and switches, facilities designers, ex-HVAC employees, et
cetera. ([http://www.opencompute.org/](http://www.opencompute.org/))

This is obviously a serious acquisition, and Carmack's talent no doubt played
a small part in it.

Explain again why "employee" in the title makes this clickbait?

~~~
anaphor
Because it makes it seem like he's just another peon, rather than the CTO of a
subsidiary. I know that Facebook requires a very diverse set of
skils/positions in order to run, it just seems kind of hilarious to say John
Carmack is now a Facebook employee :)

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antonius
Never imagined I'd be writing the words "facebook" and "John Carmack" in the
same sentence.

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pirateking
Assimilation is death, and another one of our legends has been taken.

Carmack, if there is still hope, please Do The Right Thing!

~~~
clef
You reckon Facebook is like the Borg?

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dinkumthinkum
I was really interested in what Oculus does. I'm a little sad about this; I
have to be honest. I worry Facebook will really cheapen what they are doing.
We'll see.

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elwell
The creator of Facemash is now a Facebook founder.

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leothekim
I am looking forward to Carmack writing php.

Oh wait, did I say php? I meant hack. On the hhvm.

CAN'T WAIT.

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pazimzadeh
I wonder what happens when John Carmack hangs out with Mike Matas.

