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Wisdom is not appreciated in our industry. Everyone in tech with a modicum of status or power thinks they got there because they're smarter than everyone else and there is nothing of value to be learned from others. Thus, our leaders blunder in to the same mistakes everyone else is making over and over again. We never learn.

Many founders/bosses often think that their employees are lazy because they don't work as hard as they do. They usually forget that their employees are usually paid a lot less or have magnitudes less equity.

Not everyone owns 15% of the company. I will grind too if I'm paid well enough and the potential reward is worth it.

Of course, some people never learn this but for those that do, I wonder if this sort of wisdom only comes with age and/or wealth. It’s easier to be nice/benevolent/decent when your back is not against the wall. When you’re in it, you might not even have your back against the wall but think you do.

Not enough thought goes into safely transitioning from scrappy startup to mature enterprise. Attitudes, culture, and practices have to change. It gets super awkward, and it's a rare CEO that does both well.

Practically speaking, I spend a lot of time paying down technical debt incurred during the startup years, and practices are only just maturing to where we're not digging ourselves a deeper hole anymore.

Supergiant games appears to have taken these lessons to heart given their output cadence and apparent low rate of turnover.

The MBAs don't care about the long term. Burnt out employees are an externality they can just lay off. Also, since there's a lot of risks in many dimensions, nailing work-life balance, but failing in another aspect will also end your company, so why not make them try their best in the short term while there's some runway left.

Pretty sure Carmack's idea of slack is what many companies would call "working as hard as possible"

Tell that to Elon, Zuckerberg and the like

Part of it is the upside / skin in the game aspect changing from small startup days to big company with 100s or 1000s of employees.

You hire differently as well when you are hiring 100s of people instead of a cracked team of 5.

There is a world of difference between "work nights & weekends maybe we become millionaire/billionaires together!" and "work nights & weekends so that you get an exceeds expectations and eligible for a 5% increase on the annual review cycle".

As a leader, it is unreasonable to have the same expectations before & after that transition.

They could. But they rather get their "wisdom" from Steve Jobs trivia romanticizing the grind and being an asshole.

Like Elon Musk, who once wrote in a company-wide email in 2018: "Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren't adding value"

In my experience what I see happen is that executives look at comments like this as proof that grinding people into the ground actually work

They don’t care about whether or not a company lasts for 30 years or whatever they care that stuff gets shipped and point to this as:

“the best programmer in the world was only successful because he pushed his people super hard”

So I wouldn’t be hopeful that this is an effective warning

More likely it will be taken as a plan for "how to win at any cost and then humanize yourself later".

And yet, that is what they do, meaninglessly and stupidly enough.

also this post was a reply to Sandy on X.

Thank you, this link allows clicking through to see Sandy's original thread, which is very informative and very necessary context.

My hero. Thanks

Thanks!!

In the original thread Carmack was replying to, Sandy Petersen said Q3 was the only other great game they produced after that: https://xcancel.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/206959226489744192...

Honestly I think Doom is where it came together the best, Quake was technically better (of course) but it was not a better game.

Shadow volumes were the big feature in that one, but this is a rendering, non-gameplay advancement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_volume

Being someone who was glued to this stuff at that time, I thought Doom 3 had that energy, but they were also clearly taking their time to get it right. And that time spent ended up giving Valve the chance to slip in with Half-Life 2 and steal some of their thunder. Otherwise I felt like they were setting out to do some amazing new things with the tech and game design and they (mostly) accomplished that.

Doom 3 was pretty huge of a step forward in many ways and had no competition for being SOTA except for Far Cry (1). I remember that summer as it was when I had my first job and I saved up to buy a GPU.

Not just graphics but character acting and animation, interactive world elements, deliberately dramatic scenarios in the levels (Half Life pioneered this, but Doom3 had a lot of really good ones).

It was years ahead of what was on consoles at the time.

Same feeling.

Quake and Quake III Arena was were the magic happened.

Why not? What if it did bad?

I’m not sure it’s necessarily a given that what Jobs, Gates, and Carmack created are net-positives when talking on a civilizational scale.

Though Carmack certainly gets credit for keeping me entertained for a good portion of my youth.

And gates probably gets some civilizational credit for what he’s done with his wealth after he made it.

He's not apologizing for young energy. Young energy is a wonderful thing but without accompanying wisdom and restfulness for the vast majority of people is just spinning your wheels in place burning out and not achieving anything of importance.

he had a 41% stake which led to some legal conflict https://www.eurogamer.net/news280905carmacksues

Use xcancel, not Twitter.

If you haven't already, you should read John Romero's autobiography "Doom Guy: Life in First Person". There are some details from "Masters of Doom" that Romero disputes.

Both Carmack and Romero have praised Masters of Doom as a good picture of what things were like, which seems like a good sign since a lot of it is about a time when the two were at odds.

> One of my favorite non-fiction books is Masters of Doom.

Loved this book as well. Convinced me more than anything to stay out of game dev. It was also cool getting the inside story on why Ion Storm went belly up. I have huge respect for the games that the Austin office put out and IMO Warren Spector is one of the top game designers of our generation. But it seems like the Daikatana flop was one of those rare career ending failures. It took down the Dallas office which was the main HQ, left a black mark on many people's careers and was also ill timed with the popping of the Dot Com Bubble. Funding for new, risky ideas was essentially gone in the aftermath.

It will always be Twitter...

because X is a dumb name

Let's let GTA6 be the judge of that.

I think it's quite fine to acknowledge that you pushed someone or some group of people to hard as a leader. A genre defining game is not the sort of thing that deserves wrecking someone. We may appreciate the game that came out the other end while acknowledging that it may not have been worth the cost.

It is super refreshing to hear someone saying sorry. Honestly. In a manner that actually seems sincere and self reflective.

Yes carmack may have been an asshole, but it takes a real man to recognize and own up to your own human flaws. Kudos. We need more of that in this world.

I was interested in Quake only because of the breakthrough 3D graphics, architecturally stunning levels, and later QuakeC.

I don't care for the story, and I wouldn't play Doom++. Electric polar bears and some Shrub lava mule, whatever. But swimming in deep underwater ruins with full 3-axis freedom was awesome.

I couldn't play multiplayer back then. Dialup sucked and was more expensive than AI tokens. Ethernet was still rare. Lugging a CRT monitor to friend's house was a chore reserved for a once-a-year LAN party.

Exactly. This sort of retrospective is a soft pulling up of the ladder, a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-did mea culpa where the conscience is assuaged but the spoils remain where they always were. We should accept that there is a season to burn the candle at both ends, to exploit youthful energy and to do great things.

Current Carmack would not have been capable of making Quake.

It’s always interesting when people who excel at an activity express regrets about certain decisions. I find it reassuring that being great at something doesn’t mean flawless.

Might matter a lot to sandy. I think it says a lot that decades later one of the things he remembers is someone he (or the larger company) hurt.

Sandy might remember.

from my memory of the time the whole promise of quake was that it was going to be a huge technological innovation. that’s what we wanted, that’s what kept my interest and had me playing the leaked alpha and buying on day one. this is an interesting perspective they have because quake was a huge success. nobody at the time thought it fell short of doom. so maybe it broke id’s internal culture, but it put them in a position to continue to succeed. quake 2 was the misstep, it just wasn’t that great of a game, or that’s how it looked from the outside

Id software would've benefitted from the income of another release. I thoroughly enjoyed Build games before and long after Quake.

Demand was high. I doubt they'd have suffered even if released on the same day.

> It was Carmack's job to assert technological dominance and give the industry its next generation of game engines.

Did they really?

Did ID make more money with engine licensing than with game sales?

They needed to ship. I think Quake Engine could wait, and have Doom++ would have given them some slack

This is the opposite to the Boeing problem (shipping the rehashed product instead of the brand new thing)

The issue wasn't artistic blindness, the id art was solid. The issue was a lack of game design. Doom worked because it was crazy fast and you could have a lot of sprites on the screen at once, so it had this crazy hectic quality. Quake's 3d engine meant you couldn't be so fast and couldn't anywhere close to the number of enemies on screen at once, so the game wanted a more soulslike design, but they stuck with the run and gun design but with spongier enemies, which just didn't feel great.

Doom 3 doesn’t look like artistic blindness.

>It's silly to revisit your mistakes like this

revisiting mistakes (in a healthy, non-obsessive way) is not silly at all. it is great for self growth, and in this case, is a great way to pass on wisdom.

I disagree, even for successful projects retrospection toward mistakes is worth the pain to learn.

Frankly, Unreal Tournament got a lot of that energy and peaked gameplay. Very new fresh ideas like capture the flag back then was really cool. And the speed and stability was also great.