> I pushed everyone too hard. I didn’t appreciate how maturing companies need more slack, and that running people at startup intensity constantly will wear them out.
Sounds like wisdom many companies might consider...
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.
Everybody knows this... especially those that gaslight people into working themselves to the bone. They know that people wisen up to this so they hire younger people, before they understood the game.
> You can only wring so much out of people with stress and panic.
just to add, its not only wringing out, it literally leads to worse quality, more incidents and can eventually compounds itself towards a death spiral in many cases
Well, founders run themselves that way, so they often feel as if they are “leading from the front,” with the notable exception, that they reap founder rewards (which often still come, even with failure), and the folks they are driving, will never reap those rewards.
> founders run themselves that way .. reap founder rewards (which often still come, even with failure)
It is worth noting that founders have more upside but arguably also have less downside due to this. Founders quietly get liquidity during fundraising rounds that other insiders do not, which makes a huge difference in de-risking.
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.
This is more an age thing, and it's fixed by experience. Which is why there's such a focus on youth - who else can you get to sacrifice themselves with the whisper promise that it will make them rich, who else is easily goaded with "You're so smart you should work more"?
We learn, but that's not what The Machine optimizes for, so when you realize it you leave. Other bodies throw themselves on the gears, the cycle repeats.
> This is more an age thing, and it's fixed by experience.
There is a simple trick for that, its called ageism. Good luck finding job in some youngish teams when you are over 50, you need to show extraordinary talent, experience and flexibility to be considered.
I agree with others - people often think they are smarter than others, and smart folks tend to fall into that trap easily, triple that with young age. It works sometimes for some folks and thats it.
At age 50 you contract to do the thing the young bucks butchered after the investors / executives realize what happened and beg for a "hired gun" to get it done. Then you GTFO.
This somehow resonates with me and I feel this is one of the negative side effects of a CS/Maths dominated culture and mindset that strongly emphasizes intellectual achievement, but hasn’t yet matured enough to appreciate the more messy and irrational parts of our existence.
I am a great admirer of the late Dr. Richard Hamming and he said basically the same thing. Math and science education is important, but humanities is missing for most engineers to their great detriment.
I have a BA in Economics though I am a 20-year software veteran and I can honestly say that this degree has probably helped my career more than any CS knowledge I have. My family was also heavily into the humanities in general, plus a number of my parents were in leadership positions (both corporate and military). All the stories I heard growing up had to do with people and social relations, literally never anything technical. (For context, one of my parents has an electrical engineering background and was a hardware startup founder.)
Human factors dominate all other factors and most engineers/devs/whatever tend to learn this way too late in their career. There's a sincere but ultimately naive hope that if the tech could just be really excellent then all that messy human stuff just wouldn't be a problem.
Humanities in academia is just as bad as human factors. The biggest thing that can help is having a shitty low paying job or two early in one's career. And then working formal a stable, normal company where there is real mentorship.
When I say humanities, I mean having a humanistic attitude. Looking at the social and environmental dynamics before looking at any specific technical issue in detail. Not necessarily anything to do with academia.
Strong agree that everyone would benefit from having a shitty service job or two when they're young to learn what life is really like for most people. I worked a bunch of different service jobs in high school and college, it's shocking how poorly most people treat someone just because they're standing behind the counter.
In the corporate world I find it's usually very obvious who has real life experience and who doesn't.
Which Hamming quote, btw, do you refer to? I think he mostly talks about talking with other "smart" people, and communicating what you are working on a lot (like giving talks, etc.). But, this doesn't read like much of a case for the humanities, per se.
I don't remember the exact quote verbatim but the most likely candidates of where I got it from would be: You and Your Research, How Do We Know What We Know? (if indeed, we know it), and/or Artificial Intelligence I and II.
You can find these easily on YouTube, there's a channel securitylectures which hosts them, and there are also official resources from the US Naval Postgraduate Academy in Monterey.
The biggest problem with humanities in academia is that they sometimes seem allergic to epistemic humility (which I guess was Feynman's critique of parts of the humanities).
I always thought that an Engineering degree with an MBA is a very good combination. You get very practical, useful things when you are younger. Once you have acquired enough life and work experience then you can appreciate the subtleties of cases that you study in an MBA.
You still study the humanities. I majored in software engineering, minored in business. I still took a full year of philosophy classes. Literature too.
Four years is a long time, you’re not just focused on business and engineering every waking second.
I’ve talked to a lot of journalists over the years and they almost always make this point if the conversation drifts to education. After a few years I started replying with, “Yes, I’ve studied X, maybe not as in depth as you have, but I did spend a semester on it. Have you ever taken a calculus class? Physics? Computer Science? What about economics? Statistics? Industrial and organizational psychology?”
The answer is almost always no. You get tech writers who’ve never touched a compiler and business reporters that have never studied economics. Don’t even get me started on “entertainment journalists.” It’s why almost every article, no matter the topic, feels like it was written through someone viewing the world through a very particular lens.
Engineers and business people should absolutely study the humanities. And, humanities people should absolutely study science, engineering, and economics. Specialization is for insects.
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
Given the state of politics all these complaints are not really a young person problem; stubborn judges who refuse to step aside despite cancer in their geriatric years. Reps and Senators sliding into dementia live on TV!
Most of them with law degrees and education in domains far removed from CS/math.
CS/math has nothing to do with this. It's just boring biological self selection. Why would I listen to you of all people?
Your existential dread is for you and your therapist. Not on others to coddle your ego.
The problem is Americans believe(d) all the televised to the spec of network censors propaganda about their exceptionalism. Tens of millions of 50+ year olds really came to believe they are the center of the universe. Nope, just more randos who never had a say in their existence because the messy and irrational aspects of reality don't care you exist.
> 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.
It's not just people "with a modicum of status or power," it's almost everywhere in tech. Just look at all the software engineers that contemptuously look down on other fields (except maybe hard science and economics), or talk like they're experts because they read a couple of papers.
IIRC there was a recent blog post or article (I wish I could find it) that had a nice section just running through a series of software-engineer ideas (like Effective Altruism), and pointing out they're basically re-inventing wheels that were already better explored by Philosophy. And the people who do that think they're brilliant innovators.
Mocking effective altruism is not really a difficult or complex philosophic endeavor though, even without pointing out how it's old ideas for a new audience.
And most philosophers aren't exactly immune to the quasi-Gell-Mann-Dunning-Kruger effect that plagues engineers.
To my mind, the key is that it's leaders who never learn. The sad thing is that the system gives them no incentives to do so. If you look into the work of Bob Emiliani, this seems to be the tragic conclusion he's come to in recent years. We "know" all the right things to do, but time and time again, management dehumanizes the floor staff and refuses to listen. It's often not even out of malice but because that leader simply has no reason whatsoever to change.
> We "know" all the right things to do, but time and time again, management dehumanizes the floor staff and refuses to listen. It's often not even out of malice but because that leader simply has no reason whatsoever to change.
> Over the past six years, we’ve studied why some leaders continue to support remote work, while others resist it. We surveyed thousands of executives, middle managers and frontline supervisors on a host of personality traits. When we later asked them about their stances on hybrid and remote work, their answers didn’t correlate with how much they trusted their employees or how much they loved being around people. The only trait that consistently predicted objections to remote work was narcissism — the tendency to be self-centered and entitled. The higher the opinions of themselves leaders expressed, the more they coveted power and status — and the more they favored return-to-office mandates.
It wouldn't be a bad idea to figure out how to weed those types out before they get to leadership positions. The trouble is how.
I am of many minds about this. I fully believe in the ego problem, but that's so universal that I don't think it's the only answer.
Software engineers and especially architecture folks tend to have very healthy egos themselves that get in the way of the right thing happening. The worst-case scenario is when someone has a big ego and is technically correct. That can be a very tough nut to crack, and even worse if you pile on emotional and historical baggage.
I don't think we can ever eliminate the problem of bad leaders. I am not even convinced that it is desirable to do so. Everybody has to have room to grow and sometimes a person who later becomes a great leader has to learn what that means by royally fucking up early in their career. People need room to fail and that's true for leaders as well. It's problematic obviously because leaders have outsize impact relative to the general population.
Ultimately I think the real problem is much deeper than work or industry. If you go back in history, bad leaders have always been a problem. Pharaoh blamed the builders for his bad pyramid (or at least didn't think he was part of the issue). The Vasa sank because no-one could contradict or push back on the king -- when people rule by divine right, pushing back on the king is equivalent to pushing back on God. The cathedral collapsed because the bishop insisted it be the tallest one around, then later the roof collapsed, killing many people.
Challenger, Columbia, Chernobyl, the Quebec Bridge, Deepwater Horizon, etc. all these disasters, it's basically an infinite list. We humans have these problems with each other because we have issues with power and authority and control.
This is so true. It is a direct result of the American dream and the (misdirected) idea that one’s success is a direct (and inevitable) consequence of hard work, talent and intelligence. Flash news: it is not, and success is massively dependent on luck and initial conditions. Dumb, lazy a$$holes with a rich/powerful dad will beat smart, hard working poor bastards almost every time, barring some black swan events. Now of course lots of people will jump to my throat with tons of counter examples, to which I respond: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
Not disagreeing with you. Successfull people tend to have IQs between 120 and 135. (citation needed) It makes sense because there are a LOT more people in that range than in the 135+ range. 120-135 is often sufficient. I suspect that something similar on the rich scale. People like Gates, Bezos and Musk were not fabulous wealthy, but they had enough to be able to bet big and take big chances.
The point they were making is that no matter how smart you are or hard you work, there are factors outside of your control that can prevent you from succeeding. That's not to say being smart or working hard doesn't improve the likelihood of success, but they're not a guarantee.
Yeah every year almost 100 people win over a million dollars in a lottery. That's a lot of counter examples, but I don't recommend you make winning the lottery your financial strategy.
The report you're referring to counts anyone who didn't directly inherit their wealth as "self-made". For example, it counts Zuckerberg and Bezos as self-made, despite both of them receiving substantial amounts of money from their wealthy parents when starting their respective companies.
because they're smarter than everyone else and
there is nothing of value to be learned from others
Yeah. It's absolutely unreal how often this is seen in our industry.
Especially since everybody in the industry tends to be pretty smart.
When two people with intelligence within a single standard deviation of each other, each of them is going to have competencies and expertise the other does not. There are going to be specific skills where one truly is 10x or even 100x the other, but not too many efforts boil down to one specific narrow skill.
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.
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.
It is very rare for a startup leader (usually very hands-on and practical minded) to be able to delegate and think strategically well enough to survive the transition.
Sometimes they even lack breadth in their experience (because, well, their experience was the company's startup phase).
What to do, then? replace them with outsiders? That would not be fair, and it destroys company culture. Leave them be, knowing that they're not up to the task? That's even worse, the people under them will suffer.
It sucks that the most common answer is that eventually there's a crisis, heads roll, corporate suits take over. Thus starts the period where the graph goes up and the product goes down.
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"
> Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren't adding value
I’d be interested to hear more about the context for this, since it sounds perfectly reasonable, enough that it’s triggering some cognitive dissonance with my general hatred for Musk.
It’s a truism in most companies that meetings tend to have too many people for no good reason. It’s just too easy to add extra people “just in case”, or adding whole teams when you only really needed one person, etc… and as an IC I’ve been in roles where I was in back to back meetings literally all day, leaving no time to actually get my work done. A policy of “if it’s obvious to you that a meeting doesn’t need you, feel free to walk out” sounds very reasonable to me.
Then it would likely not be nearly as “obvious” that I’m not adding value, if all it takes is some time to pass before I’m suddenly needed. If we’re on a topic that will eventually make its way to something I can help with, I should be able to see that coming.
But if you say “but what if you don’t know” then it’s the same as if literally anyone else at the company is needed at the second half of a meeting: you say “let’s loop in mrhottakes, this seems like it’s his expertise” and you get looped in.
Preemptively adding every single person on the off chance they may be needed can lead to madness: at the limit you may as well add the whole company to the invite. After all, what if they’re needed at some point? It’s extremely wasteful. Multiply the number of people by their hourly salary: that’s how much a hour meeting “costs”. Don’t be wasteful.
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.
Yeah, this is my favorite one, the number of CEOs I’ve had tell me that they were frustrated how little everyone else was putting in compared to them while they’ve had hundreds of times of the return is hilarious.
I was VP Eng of a 40+ person team at a startup, and my workaholic CEO once asked me if it bothered me that other people on the team didn't work as hard as me. My answer was very tactful, but noted that in any decent exit, I would walk away with multiples of some of those people, so it made perfect sense that I'd work harder.
But it is not only about the money. People just have their own lives, interests, and passions. For me, the lack of autonomy when doing my job kills a lot of the motivation.
That and also employees don't have the same power. Employees fundamentally have less autonomy. If you have to work inside someone else's box all the time, you're not going to want to work as hard.
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.
unless I'm mistaken John Carmack is unbelievably wealthy. Like give away a Ferrari and start a rocket company for fun wealthy. There's a number of people who read this and conclude that the message is you can't push someone hard enough, it's impossible to fail if you just push hard enough.
> unless I'm mistaken John Carmack is unbelievably wealthy.
Depends upon how you define unbelievably wealthy, which has rapidly expanded in recent years.
According to "the internet" (which is, of course, going to be wrong, but probably not by orders of magnitude) he's worth ~$50 million, which is an awful lot of money from my perspective, but still places his net worth a lot closer to us plebs than it is to all of the centibillionaires and the one trillionaire who briefly existed.
> There's a number of people who read this and conclude that the message is you can't push someone hard enough, it's impossible to fail if you just push hard enough.
It is, of course, possible to fail no matter how hard you push. Working very hard sets you up for the possibility of success, but does not guarantee it.
Lifetime earnings in the US is less than $2 million for most individuals. John Carmack is all of 55, he potentially has decades of life ahead of him. It's important to realize that Carmack was very wealthy even back in the late 90s. He doesn't have insane multi-billion dollar empires because he seemed to just shift to trying to enjoy life rather than pursuing more wealth. My general analysis here is that while money certainly can help buy some happiness, you can really only use so many yachts.
Though it is interesting how many old-school game developer stories from the employee side can be summarized as "I worked out of college for low pay, long hours and I basically lived at the office with little/no outside personal life."
I think you can say that for any nascent / figuring-it-out industry.
The early days (late 90s / early 00s) of web development and web agencies was pretty much the same thing.
We were all learning as we went, there were very few senior people, and the company owners/leaders certainly didn't know any better than we did.
But we felt lucky to be doing this exciting and cutting edge work, so being at the office working was often the thing we _wanted_ to be doing the most.
Young people often have low expenses, few external demands on their time, and poor living conditions. If they are smart, motivated and lucky they can sometimes take advantage of that situation to do extraordinary work.
Note that a growing range of professions (law, medicine, finance, journalism,, politics) have developed career paths such that they take advantage of that condition and demand that level of commitment out of their entry-level employees.
Quake III Arena was pretty entertaining. Doesn't seem like it came from a company that had been ruined for years.
I definitely noticed something around the Doom 3 release many years after Quake III Arena. The new game just didn't seem to have the same industry pushing, genre changing energy. Or maybe I was just older and had moved on, and didn't care as much.
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.
I feel like the Source engine for Half-Life 2 had some industry shaking physics due to their Havok implementation, which released in the same year. Doom 3 had cool gritty horror looks, but HL2 blew it out of the water SOTA wise, in my opinion.
Doom 3's fully real time lighting and bump mapping was technically impressive, and the live interacting UI was very trick, but the character acting and animation was definitely not SOTA. That was Half Life 2. And if we consider impact on the gaming landscape, Doom 3 was if anything a dud. Elements from that game were not taken along, including not even in subsequent Doom games. Meanwhile Half Life 2's approach to storytelling & world building, animations, physics system - those practically defined the next generation.
I built my first PC and bought both around that time. 2004-2005. I remember Doom 3 running FAR better than HL2. It's been a while but I believe I had a 2.3GHz CPU with 512 MB ram. 256mb video card.
Doom 3 and Half Life 2 were both quite demanding titles at the time, neither ran well on hardware of the era if you cranked up the settings & resolution. Doom 3 was definitely more compromised because of it, though, with too little lighting because of the "only real time lights" constraint (which the BFG edition changed, and also adopted the famous "Duct Tape" mod).
Doom 3 was SOTA in terms of realtime lighting and shadows, but that's basically it. In terms of visuals, Half-Life 2 with its baked lighting in directional lightmaps (essentially calculating three lightmaps for each surface for lighting coming from different directions, then using those with normal maps during rendering) with radiosity indirect lighting did a much better job with how good environments looked (and it scaled much better than Doom 3 which in lower settings looked worse than Quake 3). Doom 3's character rendering was also subpar compared to Half-Life 2 - let alone character animations mentioned elsewhere (Source/HL2's facial expressions were SOTA for several years after the game was released). Doom 3's physics were also not as complex as HL2's and the game didn't use them much (the expansion did better use of the physics engine and IMO the Grabber feels superior and more seamless in its use compared to the Gravity Gun but the expansion came later and while the Grabber is nice, the rest of the expansion suffered from focusing too much on gimmicks).
In general while Doom 3 has the better (and probably more forward thinking) rendering tech, HL2 also had some very good tech for its time and did a much better use of the tech they had available than Doom 3 did.
That said, personally i enjoy playing Doom 3 much more than HL2 but that is largely because Doom 3 plays more like a traditional shooter with very little scripting / storytelling to get in your way (and the little there is you can ignore it without losing anything) - you just shoot demons, find keycards/PDAs to open doors and that's it for the most part. I often just put it in low volume and play some podcast in the background :-P.
As for Far Cry, the game looked too plastic IMO, i remember playing the game and the characters' muscles had specular reflections :-P.
The quality of gunplay (sounds, feedback, enemy reactions) is a surprisingly big, yet underrated part of an FPS. Far Cry looked great but was hard to enjoy as the gunplay was crap. A big reason why Quake 2 was so popular was that the super-shotgun, rocket launcher, railgun and BFG felt amazing in their own unique way.
The problem with Doom 3's gameplay is it was too fucking dark and constantly having demons jump scare you or spawn behind you got stale quickly. At some point I need to give the BFG edition a try which at least addresses the "too fucking dark" aspect, but that's also now a 2012 game instead of a 2004 game.
Similar. I played Doom, Doom II, Quake and Quake II a lot. But by the time Doom 3 came out, the gameplay just didn't interest me. I guess I got further than you, I shot a few enemies. But meh.
Same - loved those other games but Doom 3 felt miserly in comparison to the previous games where you had space to move and options to target. D3 felt like it was just random jump scares more than much else.
Quake 2 as a game was ok, but I've always just really loved the visual esthetics of the software renderer. It had this gritty, rough feel that I really enjoyed.
Never liked the modern renderer versions, none of them look good to me, too flat, too polished.
The true successor of ID software is Half-life 1 with its goldsrc engine... but that simply was made by another studio.
HL1 took both the engine and the genre further + continued the modding culture that brough Counter strike and other mods
(Note I know very well that Half life is not an ID software game, it only took the engine that was auper heavily modified / updated- but it my opinion this is the successor)
Maybe they're related by blood, but the apple fell very far from the tree. the ID guys were quite vocal in their dislike of the slow pace & puzzle solving. This was when ID was all about technical advancements and repeatedly making the same game, faster & shinier. They also focused on multiplayer with Quake III arena and Unreal Tournament dictating where the market moved.
Quake was better for multiplayer though. Personally I enjoyed Quake 2 the most. Quake arena was designed for multiplayer but you had to practice with the cheating bots so it was kinda boring.
Quake 2 multiplayer is such a blast. The cat-and-mouse chase fights in that game is what defines the genre of "arena shooter" for me, there's still nothing else really like it.
The campaign has a place in my heart too, even if it's not perfect. A lot of DOOM's level design was predicated on claustrophobic interiors, and when you go "outside" in many levels it feels like a glorified courtyard. From the very first level, Quake 2 pushes hard to create an illusion of environmental complexity that plays very distinct from Quake 1 or DOOM.
Personally I think Unreal Tournament perfected the genre when it comes to multiplayer. Q1 was a lot of spamming of grenades and so on. Q2 was better. Still a lot of chaos. UT99 was also chaos but you could combine it with perfect moves and high precision shots. Great games all of them. I used to be an elite UT99 player but as the pace kept increasing along with my age my reaction time was simple not good enough anymore. Even if tactics compensated a lot those games are not like sneaking around in CS. I mostly played CTF. Good old times.
Idk, I think UT has some really neat design elements, like the shock rifle that are really unique. It rewards predicting the enemy a lot and a lot of mechanical skill etc. Plus there's the cool factor of guns like the Redeemer :D
QIII while solid feels missing lots of flair, it feels more generic shooter. Good, solid, but a little generic.
I think what makes Q3A seem generic nowadays is that it set the standard.
Q2 was always my favourite, that's where I started my multi-player journey. I only played against bots in the first Quake, and only played against my cousins at their place in Doom (they had multiple computers linked up back in the day).
IIRC, my problem with Quake multiplayer was that one node acted as the server, so when I connected to a friend’s computer via modem, my lag was a serious disadvantage (neither my friend nor I ever won as clients). Doom, on the other hand, simply froze both computers whenever there was a communication issue.
Although, to be fair, we played Doom over an RS-232 cable - hauling a PC across the city every weekend was a testament to our love for the game :)
I agree. I loved DOOM: it was so over the top. Tons of monsters to kill, loads of great weapons, enough ammo around that you didn’t have to worry about it too much, and it was all so colourful and gore.
Quake felt much more subdued to me. Not enough to shoot, the weapons weren’t as fun, ammo was tighter, and although in many ways it was incredibly atmospheric it was also just so brown and grey.
To me Quake always lacked the OTT fun factor of DOOM. Technically, it’s vastly superior - and an incredible achievement - but just not as good a game.
I think it’s telling that I’ll still play DOOM every so often, but I haven’t touched Quake since the 1990s.
Yeah, they could do a lot more in it with true 3D maps, but the design was all brown. The bosses were boring - the first one is kinda cool, the others not (IIRC episodes 2 and 3 were just kind of standard enemies); all three of Doom's were scary, especially the Cyberdemon when you can hear it roaring and the noise of it walking around.
The Lovecraftian vibe could have been cool but it doesn't really come through in the game in the way the satanic / hell thing did in Doom.
> I think it’s telling that I’ll still play DOOM every so often, but I haven’t touched Quake since the 1990s.
That is just your preference. For me it's the opposite, I have never finished DOOM, but Quake is one of my favourite games ever and I have replayed it countless times.
Not to mention that Quake has a fantastic community that keeps pumping out dozens of incredible maps every year, it would not be like that if people didn't love it.
I think it's about the first thing that got you hooked. My Macintosh LC II with a 486sx daughtercard couldn't play Doom well. By the time I sorted my PC situation out, there was Quake.
For me the thing about Quake was the clans, CTF, LAN parties, QuakeC mods, Quake World. It was the first of its kind, perhaps not technically, but in capturing that zeitgeist. Yeah, there were DukeNukem, Heretic, Raven, UT, but we built our camaraderies around Quake, getting all tacticool with "10-4, RTB, RGR" and hanging out on the clan's IRC :)
https://xcancel.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/206959220964578529...
Interesting to hear about the conflicts and real personal suffering. In spite of that, they built a classic genre-defining game together
Sounds like wisdom many companies might consider...
You can only wring so much out of people with stress and panic. Driving people to burn out is not the answer. Probably an unpopular take here though
Classic.
It is worth noting that founders have more upside but arguably also have less downside due to this. Founders quietly get liquidity during fundraising rounds that other insiders do not, which makes a huge difference in de-risking.
We learn, but that's not what The Machine optimizes for, so when you realize it you leave. Other bodies throw themselves on the gears, the cycle repeats.
- Attributed to Nasrudin
There is a simple trick for that, its called ageism. Good luck finding job in some youngish teams when you are over 50, you need to show extraordinary talent, experience and flexibility to be considered.
I agree with others - people often think they are smarter than others, and smart folks tend to fall into that trap easily, triple that with young age. It works sometimes for some folks and thats it.
I guess all the "rock stars" are dead at 27 so the point stands.
I have a BA in Economics though I am a 20-year software veteran and I can honestly say that this degree has probably helped my career more than any CS knowledge I have. My family was also heavily into the humanities in general, plus a number of my parents were in leadership positions (both corporate and military). All the stories I heard growing up had to do with people and social relations, literally never anything technical. (For context, one of my parents has an electrical engineering background and was a hardware startup founder.)
Human factors dominate all other factors and most engineers/devs/whatever tend to learn this way too late in their career. There's a sincere but ultimately naive hope that if the tech could just be really excellent then all that messy human stuff just wouldn't be a problem.
Strong agree that everyone would benefit from having a shitty service job or two when they're young to learn what life is really like for most people. I worked a bunch of different service jobs in high school and college, it's shocking how poorly most people treat someone just because they're standing behind the counter.
In the corporate world I find it's usually very obvious who has real life experience and who doesn't.
You can find these easily on YouTube, there's a channel securitylectures which hosts them, and there are also official resources from the US Naval Postgraduate Academy in Monterey.
Four years is a long time, you’re not just focused on business and engineering every waking second.
I’ve talked to a lot of journalists over the years and they almost always make this point if the conversation drifts to education. After a few years I started replying with, “Yes, I’ve studied X, maybe not as in depth as you have, but I did spend a semester on it. Have you ever taken a calculus class? Physics? Computer Science? What about economics? Statistics? Industrial and organizational psychology?”
The answer is almost always no. You get tech writers who’ve never touched a compiler and business reporters that have never studied economics. Don’t even get me started on “entertainment journalists.” It’s why almost every article, no matter the topic, feels like it was written through someone viewing the world through a very particular lens.
Engineers and business people should absolutely study the humanities. And, humanities people should absolutely study science, engineering, and economics. Specialization is for insects.
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
―Heinlein
It's easy to conflate recognition with achievement when that's all you know in life.
Most of them with law degrees and education in domains far removed from CS/math.
CS/math has nothing to do with this. It's just boring biological self selection. Why would I listen to you of all people?
Your existential dread is for you and your therapist. Not on others to coddle your ego.
The problem is Americans believe(d) all the televised to the spec of network censors propaganda about their exceptionalism. Tens of millions of 50+ year olds really came to believe they are the center of the universe. Nope, just more randos who never had a say in their existence because the messy and irrational aspects of reality don't care you exist.
It's not just people "with a modicum of status or power," it's almost everywhere in tech. Just look at all the software engineers that contemptuously look down on other fields (except maybe hard science and economics), or talk like they're experts because they read a couple of papers.
IIRC there was a recent blog post or article (I wish I could find it) that had a nice section just running through a series of software-engineer ideas (like Effective Altruism), and pointing out they're basically re-inventing wheels that were already better explored by Philosophy. And the people who do that think they're brilliant innovators.
And most philosophers aren't exactly immune to the quasi-Gell-Mann-Dunning-Kruger effect that plagues engineers.
To my mind, the key is that it's leaders who never learn. The sad thing is that the system gives them no incentives to do so. If you look into the work of Bob Emiliani, this seems to be the tragic conclusion he's come to in recent years. We "know" all the right things to do, but time and time again, management dehumanizes the floor staff and refuses to listen. It's often not even out of malice but because that leader simply has no reason whatsoever to change.
There's another possibility that the people who gravitate to "leadership" have certain personality problems that cause those behaviors, e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/opinion/office-work-wfh-b....
> Over the past six years, we’ve studied why some leaders continue to support remote work, while others resist it. We surveyed thousands of executives, middle managers and frontline supervisors on a host of personality traits. When we later asked them about their stances on hybrid and remote work, their answers didn’t correlate with how much they trusted their employees or how much they loved being around people. The only trait that consistently predicted objections to remote work was narcissism — the tendency to be self-centered and entitled. The higher the opinions of themselves leaders expressed, the more they coveted power and status — and the more they favored return-to-office mandates.
It wouldn't be a bad idea to figure out how to weed those types out before they get to leadership positions. The trouble is how.
Software engineers and especially architecture folks tend to have very healthy egos themselves that get in the way of the right thing happening. The worst-case scenario is when someone has a big ego and is technically correct. That can be a very tough nut to crack, and even worse if you pile on emotional and historical baggage.
I don't think we can ever eliminate the problem of bad leaders. I am not even convinced that it is desirable to do so. Everybody has to have room to grow and sometimes a person who later becomes a great leader has to learn what that means by royally fucking up early in their career. People need room to fail and that's true for leaders as well. It's problematic obviously because leaders have outsize impact relative to the general population.
Ultimately I think the real problem is much deeper than work or industry. If you go back in history, bad leaders have always been a problem. Pharaoh blamed the builders for his bad pyramid (or at least didn't think he was part of the issue). The Vasa sank because no-one could contradict or push back on the king -- when people rule by divine right, pushing back on the king is equivalent to pushing back on God. The cathedral collapsed because the bishop insisted it be the tallest one around, then later the roof collapsed, killing many people.
Challenger, Columbia, Chernobyl, the Quebec Bridge, Deepwater Horizon, etc. all these disasters, it's basically an infinite list. We humans have these problems with each other because we have issues with power and authority and control.
Especially since everybody in the industry tends to be pretty smart.
When two people with intelligence within a single standard deviation of each other, each of them is going to have competencies and expertise the other does not. There are going to be specific skills where one truly is 10x or even 100x the other, but not too many efforts boil down to one specific narrow skill.
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 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
> So if my theorem is correct, and Quake gutted id Software, was it worth it? Well I'd say yes absolutely.
https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/2069592330152362034
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.
It is very rare for a startup leader (usually very hands-on and practical minded) to be able to delegate and think strategically well enough to survive the transition.
Sometimes they even lack breadth in their experience (because, well, their experience was the company's startup phase).
What to do, then? replace them with outsiders? That would not be fair, and it destroys company culture. Leave them be, knowing that they're not up to the task? That's even worse, the people under them will suffer.
It sucks that the most common answer is that eventually there's a crisis, heads roll, corporate suits take over. Thus starts the period where the graph goes up and the product goes down.
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"
I’d be interested to hear more about the context for this, since it sounds perfectly reasonable, enough that it’s triggering some cognitive dissonance with my general hatred for Musk.
It’s a truism in most companies that meetings tend to have too many people for no good reason. It’s just too easy to add extra people “just in case”, or adding whole teams when you only really needed one person, etc… and as an IC I’ve been in roles where I was in back to back meetings literally all day, leaving no time to actually get my work done. A policy of “if it’s obvious to you that a meeting doesn’t need you, feel free to walk out” sounds very reasonable to me.
But if you say “but what if you don’t know” then it’s the same as if literally anyone else at the company is needed at the second half of a meeting: you say “let’s loop in mrhottakes, this seems like it’s his expertise” and you get looped in.
Preemptively adding every single person on the off chance they may be needed can lead to madness: at the limit you may as well add the whole company to the invite. After all, what if they’re needed at some point? It’s extremely wasteful. Multiply the number of people by their hourly salary: that’s how much a hour meeting “costs”. Don’t be wasteful.
And tight objectives. Have an endgame. Know what "done" looks like, and get there, as fast as possible.
Also, only the minimal number of attendees. This helps a lot.
Not everyone owns 15% of the company. I will grind too if I'm paid well enough and the potential reward is worth it.
Depends upon how you define unbelievably wealthy, which has rapidly expanded in recent years.
According to "the internet" (which is, of course, going to be wrong, but probably not by orders of magnitude) he's worth ~$50 million, which is an awful lot of money from my perspective, but still places his net worth a lot closer to us plebs than it is to all of the centibillionaires and the one trillionaire who briefly existed.
> There's a number of people who read this and conclude that the message is you can't push someone hard enough, it's impossible to fail if you just push hard enough.
It is, of course, possible to fail no matter how hard you push. Working very hard sets you up for the possibility of success, but does not guarantee it.
Would Carmack be in a position to give advice on how to make Quake if id slacked itself into shutting down before Quake was finished?
Remember that Carmack also started a rocket company. You probably wouldn't take his advice about how to run successful rocket companies.
(this isn't shade on Carmack, he's my hero)
The early days (late 90s / early 00s) of web development and web agencies was pretty much the same thing.
We were all learning as we went, there were very few senior people, and the company owners/leaders certainly didn't know any better than we did.
But we felt lucky to be doing this exciting and cutting edge work, so being at the office working was often the thing we _wanted_ to be doing the most.
The inmates ran the asylum, as they say..
Note that a growing range of professions (law, medicine, finance, journalism,, politics) have developed career paths such that they take advantage of that condition and demand that level of commitment out of their entry-level employees.
I definitely noticed something around the Doom 3 release many years after Quake III Arena. The new game just didn't seem to have the same industry pushing, genre changing energy. Or maybe I was just older and had moved on, and didn't care as much.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTJ1weGimZQ
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_3vMUOayyc
Doom 3's fully real time lighting and bump mapping was technically impressive, and the live interacting UI was very trick, but the character acting and animation was definitely not SOTA. That was Half Life 2. And if we consider impact on the gaming landscape, Doom 3 was if anything a dud. Elements from that game were not taken along, including not even in subsequent Doom games. Meanwhile Half Life 2's approach to storytelling & world building, animations, physics system - those practically defined the next generation.
In general while Doom 3 has the better (and probably more forward thinking) rendering tech, HL2 also had some very good tech for its time and did a much better use of the tech they had available than Doom 3 did.
That said, personally i enjoy playing Doom 3 much more than HL2 but that is largely because Doom 3 plays more like a traditional shooter with very little scripting / storytelling to get in your way (and the little there is you can ignore it without losing anything) - you just shoot demons, find keycards/PDAs to open doors and that's it for the most part. I often just put it in low volume and play some podcast in the background :-P.
As for Far Cry, the game looked too plastic IMO, i remember playing the game and the characters' muscles had specular reflections :-P.
I didn't love Q2, but really enjoyed Q3A.
Never liked the modern renderer versions, none of them look good to me, too flat, too polished.
Honestly I think Doom is where it came together the best, Quake was technically better (of course) but it was not a better game.
HL1 took both the engine and the genre further + continued the modding culture that brough Counter strike and other mods
(Note I know very well that Half life is not an ID software game, it only took the engine that was auper heavily modified / updated- but it my opinion this is the successor)
The campaign has a place in my heart too, even if it's not perfect. A lot of DOOM's level design was predicated on claustrophobic interiors, and when you go "outside" in many levels it feels like a glorified courtyard. From the very first level, Quake 2 pushes hard to create an illusion of environmental complexity that plays very distinct from Quake 1 or DOOM.
Go here right now and play a few games against bots and people of Quake III and UT99: https://dos.zone/mp/?lobby=*
There is no denying that movement and gameplay is much more enjoyable in Quake compared to UT. Even with the lack in variety on all fronts.
QIII while solid feels missing lots of flair, it feels more generic shooter. Good, solid, but a little generic.
Q2 was always my favourite, that's where I started my multi-player journey. I only played against bots in the first Quake, and only played against my cousins at their place in Doom (they had multiple computers linked up back in the day).
Although, to be fair, we played Doom over an RS-232 cable - hauling a PC across the city every weekend was a testament to our love for the game :)
Quake felt much more subdued to me. Not enough to shoot, the weapons weren’t as fun, ammo was tighter, and although in many ways it was incredibly atmospheric it was also just so brown and grey.
To me Quake always lacked the OTT fun factor of DOOM. Technically, it’s vastly superior - and an incredible achievement - but just not as good a game.
I think it’s telling that I’ll still play DOOM every so often, but I haven’t touched Quake since the 1990s.
The Lovecraftian vibe could have been cool but it doesn't really come through in the game in the way the satanic / hell thing did in Doom.
That is just your preference. For me it's the opposite, I have never finished DOOM, but Quake is one of my favourite games ever and I have replayed it countless times.
Not to mention that Quake has a fantastic community that keeps pumping out dozens of incredible maps every year, it would not be like that if people didn't love it.
Did you think I hadn’t realised?
For me the thing about Quake was the clans, CTF, LAN parties, QuakeC mods, Quake World. It was the first of its kind, perhaps not technically, but in capturing that zeitgeist. Yeah, there were DukeNukem, Heretic, Raven, UT, but we built our camaraderies around Quake, getting all tacticool with "10-4, RTB, RGR" and hanging out on the clan's IRC :)
Quake and Quake III Arena was were the magic happened.
It... sort of did, but it was extremely shallow. It was a preset sequence of matches against increasingly difficult bots.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrmJgXT8WSY