John Carmack Archive – Interviews [pdf]
I found these insights interesting:<p>"I know that most people won't believe it, but a 100x increase in income really didn't have that big of an impact on me as a person. It is certainly nice to be in a position where people can't exert any leverage on you, but it's definitely not the primary focus of my life. I get to drive a Ferrari in to work, but my day to day life is almost exactly the same as it was eight years ago. I get up, go in to work, hopefully do some good stuff, then go home. I'm still happy." [1]<p>[...]<p>"I feel bad for some companies out there. The founders, who are these incredible engineers, are now directors of their departments doing management rather than engineering. At the same time most of the people they are managing are nowhere near as good as they were at doing the actual work. That's what I hope never happens to me. I want to stay in the trenches working on the things all the time. There is some benefit to sitting back, reading and researching and getting some broader scope on it. But if you're divorced from the low level nuts and bolts of things, like how this actually applies to the real world, then you're just an academic. You get these huge disconnects between what an academic can do and what somebody in production can do." [2]<p>[1] Page 77<p>[2] Page 89