Meta’s turn away from social media and into virtual reality has hit another roadblock. one of the executives of the company, John Carmack, who helped build Meta’s Oculus company as CTO, is stepping on away from Meta amid frustration over the company’s efficiency.
Carmack took over as CTO of Oculus (now called Reality Labs) in 2013, and is closing the door behind him after nearly ten years, having worked as a consulting CTO since 2019. News of the departure broke this weekend. de Carmack later, according to Carmack, shared an internal memo within the company that was leaked to the press. Carmack shared the entire memo (with an edit) to your facebook account Friday afternoon. In the letter, Carmack describes how he has been pleased with the technology Oculus has produced, but he is unhappy with the way the company is run.
“The problem is our efficiency,” Carmack wrote in the letter. He explained: “We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and waste effort. There’s no sugarcoating this; I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy.”
Meta did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment on Carmack’s departure.
G/O Media may receive a commission
Carmack explains in a follow-up paragraph the internal friction that even he, as a senior executive, felt in trying to steer the company in a more proactive direction:
It has been a struggle for me. I have a voice at the highest levels here, so it sounds like I should be able to move things around, but I’m clearly not persuasive enough. A good fraction of the things I complain about eventually come back to me after a year or two pass and the evidence accumulates, but I’ve never been able to kill stupid things before they do damage, or set a direction and make a team really stick to it. that. I think my influence on margins has been positive, but it’s never been a major driver.
Goals Head of Technology, andres bosworth, responded to Carmack’s letter On twitterstating: “[John], it is impossible to overstate the impact it has had on our work and the industry in general. His technical prowess is widely known, but it is his relentless focus on create value for the people we will remember the most. Thank you and see you in VR.”
Carmack’s departure comes as Meta grapples with an ongoing identity crisis, caught in purgatory between his VR ventures and his social media past. As the company tries to pivot more and more towards virtual reality, the future of the Metaverse still seems a bit black (and generally ugly).
