Beamer wrote on Feb 6, 2013, 11:09:

yuastnav wrote on Feb 6, 2013, 11:04:

Beamer wrote on Feb 6, 2013, 11:01:
[...]
You understand that he writes the engines, not programs the games and missions, right?
That he has nothing to do with that?

I may be mistaken but didn't he say during a Q&A at Quakecon that he actually doesn't write the engines anymore because there are other people at his company who are just much, much more better at that than he is?
He may have been a good programmer in the 90s but that time is long gone.
If I think back to that Q&A in 2011 it seems more like he is a sort of designer who looks at how the gameplay and design decisions fit together and whether he likes it or not.

Though I have to admit that I could not really figure out what exactly his task was at that company besides being at the top.

He almost definitely does the Tim Sweeney model of doing graphics research. He's probably always working a generation of the engine out. It's other people actually taking his research and high level programming and turning it into something you can make games on.

In other words, he's doing the intellectual, fun, and hard work and others are doing the more gruntish and tedious work (not that it isn't hard and intellectual.) Carmack isn't writing networking code or physical inputs, but you'd better believe he's writing the insanely brilliant lighting algorithms, or at least the basis for them.