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."