When Facebook Inc. incorporated Meta Platforms and had Facebook to be a subsidiary alongside Instagram and WhatsApp in a move that Mark Zuckerberg justified to allow the company he founded to be the leading form of the metaverse.

Metaverse for those who need a refresher is practically our life being mixed with video, virtual reality and augmented reality, that is the TLDR of the concept.

For Mark Zuckerberg the idea is justifiable even if it costs Meta a lot of money and investor’s patiences and maybe, we can sum up part of its team.

Being the most notorious exit so far after the creators of Instagram and WhatsApp (disgruntled with Mark Zuckerberg), we got John Carmack who was the co-founder of id Software and part of the original  dev team of Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM and Quake, had leaved Meta and not in a good mood.

Carmack make public his exit from his position of VR Executive Consultant at Meta, venting about frustration since he was incorporated to Meta after the Oculus buyout of 2013

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This is the end of my decade in VR.

I have mixed feelings.

Quest 2 is almost exactly what I wanted to see from the beginning – mobile hardware, inside out tracking, optional PC streaming, 4k (ish) screen, cost effective. Despite all the complaints I have about our software, millions of people are still getting value out of it. We have a good product. It is successful, and successful products make the world a better place. It all could have happened a bit faster and been going better if different decisions had been made, but we built something pretty close to The Right Thing.

The issue is our efficiency.

Some will ask why I care how the progress is happening, as long as it is happening?

If I am trying to sway others, I would say that an org that has only known inefficiency is ill prepared for the inevitable competition and/or belt tightening, but really, it is the more personal pain of seeing a 5% GPU utilization number in production. I am offended by it.

[edit: I was being overly poetic here, as several people have missed the intention. As a systems optimization person, I care deeply about efficiency. When you work hard at optimization for most of your life, seeing something that is grossly inefficient hurts your soul. I was likening observing our organization's performance to seeing a tragically low number on a profiling tool.]

We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort. There is no way to sugar coat this; I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy. Some may scoff and contend we are doing just fine, but others will laugh and say “Half? Ha! I’m at quarter efficiency!”

It has been a struggle for me. 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 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, or set a direction and have a team actually stick to it. I think my influence at the margins has been positive, but it has never been a prime mover.

This was admittedly self-inflicted – I could have moved to Menlo Park after the Oculus acquisition and tried to wage battles with generations of leadership, but I was busy programming, and I assumed I would hate it, be bad at it, and probably lose anyway.

Enough complaining. I wearied of the fight and have my own startup to run, but the fight is still winnable! VR can bring value to most of the people in the world, and no company is better positioned to do it than Meta. Maybe it actually is possible to get there by just plowing ahead with current practices, but there is plenty of room for improvement.

Mark Zuckerberg and his crafting, is his way or the highway, had got historically the bad side of people he shouldn’t have alienate including Instagram co founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger due Zuckerberg clashing with them on how Instagram should operate after being converted on a Meta subsidiary and WhatsApp Co-founder Brian Acton left in protest on how Mark Zuckerberg wanted to monetize WhatsApp outside of what it was created for in the first place, a secure messaging service.