What is Happening Inside Meta?
Recently meta put out two trailers for its vision of vr and the metaverse. The trailer showed off a concept design for a vr headset and an interesting concept for finger tracking. The headset shown in both trailers is of course much sleeker than the quest or what we’ve seen of the leaked project cambria headset. These concepts play out the future meta is looking to build but some internet things cropped up showing that the road for meta to get there might be rough.
On a news forum posted by the startup cultivator Y combinator current and former employees commented on Meta’s recent plans to push pause on commercial production of new ar glasses, portal and other hardware.
The user which is cracking me up
deadassfifr posted, I am a software engineer working at FB on Quest 2 etc. I go back and forth on this stuff in my head, but at this point I get the sense that it's basically a disaster. The incentives and management strategy at FB is not congruent to solving very difficult mobile hardware/software problems that they actually have.
The Quest 2 doesn't have the horsepower to drive a good experience and it still runs out of battery super fast. I think upper management expects this issue to be solved by incremental hardware improvements, but the fact is that mobile phones are pushing up against the same moore's law limits that are hitting the rest of the industry. They could maybe extract 1 order of magnitude better performance out of the package if they put together a great hardware team instead of licensing some crap out from Qualcomm. I think this is basically what Apple is doing, but I don't see it happening at FB.
The incentives at FB are more suitable for corporate climbers and constant schizophrenic over-sharing of ideas. You are never free from the next review cycle, and it has points baked in to basically evaluate your people skills. This seems fine at first, but the end result is that every single person ends up vying for a little piece of every one else's time, in order to demonstrate some "impact" in that sense. Every day is another hour of meetings with 20 different people. It's driving me crazy, and I think it will do the same thing to any passionate low-level engineer (either hardware or software).
Everybody has to be a leader, very little real work is getting done.
There is also some kind of incentive to generate more features and crap for e.g. horizons. I understand they're trying to throw a bunch of things at the wall to find what sticks, but the content teams don't seem to understand the efficiency constraints, and with so many silly features it feels like death by a thousand cuts.
John Carmack is very vocal pointing at various actual problems that need to be solved, but at this point browsing his feed is starting to feel kind of sad and hopeless. The incentives will always create messes faster than they can be cleaned up. The software will get slower while it needs to be faster. The hardware won't provide significant compute upgrades we desperately need. I guess we'll wait for 1-2 more reorgs until they move away from the failing VR push.
I think we would be seeing a very different outcome right now if Oculus hadn't been bought by FB, but that ship has sailed. Most of the Oculus people either quit or were fired when they decided to kill desktop VR in favor of mobile (a decision that is now being re-evaluated). It's just one bad decision after another.
Sorry for such a negative post. Maybe I should try some of those mindfulness classes so I can calm down.
A possible former employee responded that they quit after learning the work culture was more driven on execution rather than innovation stating a core critique of reality labs culture is that it doesn't produce anything new, but copies from others with ruthless execution.
Again this could be unsubstantiated and from people who are playing pretend on the internet but I found it quite interesting and the way they described things felt like they knew the inside pretty well. What are your thoughts on all of this? Let me know down below and I’ll catch you in the next quickie