"Why shouldn't it" does not answer the question, which is "what made desktop computers (and servers, to a certain degree) a unique popular product that customers routinely build out of parts".
I am not questioning repairs (which almost never happen, as PC hardware in general is very robust these days) or upgrades to factory-built PCs (which should account for probably 1% of the PC component retail volume). I am wondering why there is an entire industry selling colorful boxes (as opposed to brown cardboard with a part number) with things that are not usable in any way when taken out of the box and are only functional when combined with 10+ other things in somewhat nontrivial way. Forget about "why shouldn't it" and "it was like this forever" and look at this phenomenon with a fresh eye. This is ridiculous (in a factual way, not saying this judgmentally).
I frankly don't understand why RAM for consumers is a thing. I don't know of any other popular consumer good that is routinely built by the consumer out of individual components. You buy cars, phones, refrigerators, amplifiers, et cetera et cetera whole. Why computers are different, in the year of our lord 2025, is a mystery to me. This shouldn't be happening, and I am saying this as a hardware enthusiast who builds his own computers since Windows 3.1 days.
It must be said that "cities", as used in this piece, is a rather generous term. Sedro-Woolley has 13K residents. Stanwood has 9K. They probably don't have enough people on payroll to handle FOA requests, hence "panic".
I just realized that you might not know what a "bootcamper" is. Facebook's hiring process generally goes like this:
- you're interviewed with a random team and evaluated if you'd be a good fit for the company.
- you are hired and go through a multi-week "bootcamp" to learn FB's vocabulary, processes, and tech stack, fixing some real bugs and implementing some real (but minor) features in the process.
- upon completing the bootcamp you seek a team that is of interest to you and if interest is mutual, you join the team. If you can't find a team after X weeks, you part ways with the company.
First of all, AR/VR is a tough problem space, often for reasons not immediately obvious to common folk. Second, Facebook in my opinion is a wrong home for long-term efforts that may not bear fruit for many years, with its 6-month attention span of employee performance management and its "move fast and break things" culture (both of which clashed with the meticulous hardware-oriented Oculus culture). And finally, a significant portion of people working in AR/VR didn't believe in AR/VR as a product. Some were there for the gravy train, some were there for interesting OS work, some were there for bleeding-edge technology, but I'd say less than half would say "we're working on something that people will love and pay money for". To me it felt more like well-funded academia even and less like a startup (which it was supposed to be).
There were many, many influential software projects done in the past that are not games. Some of the people responsible worked in AR/VR and drove its vision and technical roadmaps.
Knowledge of C (XROS was written in C and during the interviews the candidate rather uncommonly wasn't given a choice of programming language) and general understanding of how a computer works at a low level. Knowing the purpose of "volatile", understanding cache lines, mapping virtual memory to physical memory, DMA, this kind of thing.
I think everyone had a degree but looking at my degree (applied math) in particular nothing that I had learned at the uni was immediately useful and I think there isn't really anything that would prevent a smart person with a GED and some history of, say, Linux kernel contributions from succeeding on a team like this. Except may be a degree is needed for H1B visa for those who need it.
I believe the suboptimality concern was more about time to market and innovation velocity, and less about money. At the time FB felt a real sense of urgency given the anticipated AR/VR explosion (in a good sense) and presence of competitors in the space, both real and imaginary.
Just a small bunch of XROS people came from FB proper (mostly managers) because an average FB SWE has no required skills. Most folks were hired from the industry at E5/E6 and I think we had ever took one or two bootcampers that ultimately were not successful and quickly moved elsewhere in FB.
XROS had a completely new and rapidly evolving system call surface. No vendor would've been able to even start working on a driver for their device, let alone hand off a stable, complete result. It wasn't a case of "just rename a few symbols in a FreeBSD implementation and run a bunch of tests".
Carmack absolutely 100% percent did not say "these people are incompetent". What he said boils down to "these people are world's best experts on writing operating systems and they'd love to write a new one from the scratch but I strongly believe that writing a new operating system is not the best path forward."
There were almost no kids on the XROS team. The bulk of the team were E6s with graying hairs, multiple kids, and very impressive history of work on other well-known operating systems -- and most of them wrote a lot of code. This was the senior-est team I ever was a member of. Also, the most enjoyable interview process I've ever been through, no bullshit whatsoever and a rare case that I actually had to implement the exact thing that I was asked about during the interview (took me 3 weeks compared to 20 minutes during the loop, go figure).
XROS was an org that hired for specific specialist positions (as opposed to the usual "get hired into FB, go through the bootcamp, and find your place within the company"). At one point we got two separate requests from the recruiting execs:
- Your tech screen pass rate is way too low compared to other teams at FB. Please consider making your tech screen easier to expand the pool of candidates.
- Your interview-to-offer rate is way too low compared to other teams at FB. Please consider making your tech screen more difficult to reduce time that engineers spend on interviewing and writing feedback.
Anyway, IMO it was a very strong team in a very wrong environment. Most of the folks on the team hated the Facebook culture, despised the PSC process (despite having no problems with delivering impact in a greenfield project), had very little respect for non-technical managers coming from FB proper (the XROS team saw themselves as part of Oculus), and the majority I believe fled to other companies as soon as the project was scrapped. The pay was good however, and the work was very interesting. My overall impression was that most people on the team saw XROS as a journey, not a destination, and it was one of the reasons why it was destined to never ship.