> The more you know, the more you realize you don't know.
The thing I like about John Carmack is that he really appears to live this through and through. I can't say I know him or have worked with him or anything, but whenever I read something like this of his, I enjoy the fact that it is virtually free of ego and posture. He doesn't proclaim or state - he tries things, explores things, and talks about what he found, his successes and failures, and the next hill he wants to climb. He openly admits when things are more challenging than he thought they would be or if something he worked on didn't turn out how he wanted it to.
I submit that Carmack wasn't shaped by the same kind of industry culture that most of the working people on HN were - different time, different kind of software, different funding model. The way our industry incentivizes ego, posture and dishonesty (and punishes the lack thereof) means that young Carmacks either find a rare lagoon, change fields - or get squashed into a different shape. Smart people can still do good work, but the required output is mostly other than technical, and knowledge takes a back seat.
This is what we are spending our lives on!
Finding like-minded people is not impossible, but like-minded workplaces hardly seem to exist. If you are not a Carmack-scale God to create your own lagoon, you literally can't afford just to be straight up about everything. You will fail every interview. That is why this is so rare and refreshing - it is rare because the environment heavily discourages it. Only some people need an ego-oriented environment - but everyone has to eat.
There is actually a parallel in science. People who start out deeply interested in truth and their subject have to exist in an environment which really isn't about those things. They either leave or learn to self-promote, inflate the sizes of their grants and chase fashion rather than bearing down on a particular subject in a disciplined way.
If this culture won't change then we need more lagoons.
In Feynman's words: "So I have just one wish for you--the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom."
I came to that same conclusion a few years ago. Sometime in college I was pretty happy, felt I was making good progression on real knowledge in a field. Now, a few years later - I'm not sure what I know is real and true, which are high order approximations, and which are flat out wrong, but still right enough to not cause too many problems.
an example: in grade school you learn how to mix colors, primary colors with paints, etc. then a little later, in middle school you learn no.. for light based, its not the same type of addition. then a little later you learn there are like an infinite possible primary colors - then a little later you learn color is actually a frequency or combination of frequencies, and you start asking yourself if your friend detects these colors the same way you do. does red to you really look blue to your friend.
As you throw logs on the campfire, the perimeter of darkness grows.
I like that one. I've always thought of knowledge as a sphere and what the surface of the sphere touches is the intersect of your knowledge with what you know and don't know. As your knowledge grows so the does the sphere and your awareness about what you do not know.
Not saying that business people are less intelligent (far from it, good business people are as rare as good hackers). But pointing out that in the business world, confidence is a signaling mechanism for success when they speak to others outside the business field. This easily gives rise to an impedance mismatch between the business world and the technical worlds. Appropriately enough, the very best business people I know when talking about an issue their own field are just as doubtful about themselves as good technical people.
Fractal difficulty of a field is the impetus for a lot of this doubt, and it seems pretty opaque to outsiders in every field I've seen. This seems to be prevalent here when many hackers do not acknowledge the difficulty of marketing, sales, accounting, etc.
The thing I like about John Carmack is that he really appears to live this through and through. I can't say I know him or have worked with him or anything, but whenever I read something like this of his, I enjoy the fact that it is virtually free of ego and posture. He doesn't proclaim or state - he tries things, explores things, and talks about what he found, his successes and failures, and the next hill he wants to climb. He openly admits when things are more challenging than he thought they would be or if something he worked on didn't turn out how he wanted it to.