Tech Industry Titan John Carmack Is Leaving Meta

John Carmack, the tech industry titan known for his work on virtual reality and classic games like DOOM and Quake, has stepped down as the consulting CTO at Meta.

The news was first reported by Insider and The New York Times which cited people familiar with the company and published pieces of his internal memo to employees.

On December 16, Carmack published a Facebook post where he shared the full massage, "just as the internal employees saw it." In it, he noted that he was resigning from his role at Meta with "mixed feelings" adding that "this is the end of [his] decade in VR."

Among the main reasons for the departure, according to Carmack, were the extremely low efficiency of Meta's teams and, as he believes, wrong technological solutions and errors, on which the company lost several man-years of development. He also noted that Meta has a "ridiculous amount of people and resources" but that the employees "constantly self-sabotage and squander effort."

"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," Carmack wrote. "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."

John Carmack is mostly known as the creator of DOOM and Quake, but he's also been a key figure in the game dev market in recent decades. He joined Oculus as CTO in 2013 after receiving the first Oculus Rift prototypes from Oculus' founder Palmer Lucky and continued in that role after Facebook's $2 billion acquisition of the company. In 2019, he reduced his role at the company, stepping down as CTO of Oculus to take on a new role as CTO of Consulting.

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