It has also never been conclusively explained what “invert a binary tree” means (see the tweet a sibling comment linked to — that’s what the Homebrew guy claimed he wasn’t hired for not being able to do).
Well, no I didn't [write something worthy of Google]. I wrote a simple package manager. Anyone could write one. And in fact mine is pretty bad. It doesn't do dependency management properly. It doesn’t handle edge case behavior well. It isn’t well tested. It’s shit frankly.
But he goes on:
On the other hand, my software was insanely successful. Why is that? Well the answer is not in the realm of computer science. I have always had a user-experience focus to my software. Homebrew cares about the user. When things go wrong with Homebrew it tries as hard as it can to tell you why, it searches GitHub for similar issues and points you to them. It cares about you.
1. https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin... (Quora link, sorry)
We can apply the same logic to almost anything.. Because nothing is truly original and "difficult/impressive" are pretty broad metrics. Feel free to give us your definition.
Software engineering is about building functional systems for humans. Quite frankly, Google needs to hire more people that are able to deliver products that actually work.. From the looks of it, hiring people that can solve "impressive" and "difficult" sorting algo puzzles yield to the Sluggish Gmail mess we have at the moment.
Maybe google needs to start hiring competent people instead of anyone that can recite the corporate gospel.
Just my 2c.
in my job i've dealt with dozens of Google engineers across a few teams... 95%+ of the time I don't get useful answers, and sometimes no answer at all. We have found many bugs in their systems, as well as broken API endpoints that did not work as advertised. Dealing with one issue right now that no one at google has been able to assist with in over 12 months. Of course with all the turn around on some teams, the issues just keep getting passed to the next guy.
they are by far the worst of the FAANG-level engineering teams we deal with, competency is severely lacking.
It's a lot like syncing files - e.g. how Dropbox looked similarly deceptively easy to build but really wasnt.
IMHO the fact that the homebrew guy didn't get hired and that golang package management was a dumpster fire for years isn't coincidental. Both were part and parcel of a systemic bias that plagues Google's culture that they're blissfully unaware of.
But I don't think you can generalize to the whole company. For example, the Dart package manager is pretty nice.
Regardless, I don't think qualifications like this should bypass the interview. The author almost sounded a little entitled when describing the rejection. That said, I don't think his achievements got sufficient weight while evaluating him as a candidate.
See my comment [1] regarding what these interviews are selecting for -- it might be a bad process, but it might come closer to the intended goals than other processes do.
Here's the thing - outside some special projects for which people are hired without going through the standard interview process Google does not want those who can take shitty lemons and convert them to tasty lemonade. Google wants specific kinds of butts that fit into a specific kind of seat. It wants the most homogeneous high output monkeys that would do what they are told, such as spitting out a code to invert a binary tree.