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Comment by microtonal | Hacker News Reader

Indeed, it's not a difficult question.

I think people were making fun of Google, because it is a caricature of their whole interview process.

If a large number of your engineers is using Homebrew, having its developer is an asset for many different reasons (e.g. influencing the focus of the project, getting formulae in that interest you, or simply improving a tool that is important to your productivity). But no, they reject him because he cannot invert a binary tree.

It's like throwing one of the better offenders out of your soccer team, because he cannot substitute as a goalkeeper.

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Having the developer of Homebrew as an employee is only an advantage if you want to influence it's development, and if the developer is happy for his application to be influenced by his employer rather than the Homebrew community as a whole.

In fact, I would see Google hiring the leaders of open source projects in order to influence the direction the project takes as a problem. Sponsoring an open source project is brilliant, and Google are great at that, but buying influence over it is completely different and (potentially) an issue that would lead to people forking the project.

If interviews are really made to maintain high-engineering standards and prevent bad hires, interviewing and rejecting the author of a software that 90% of your employees use everyday is quite perplexing indeed.

While I understand that interviews are sometimes necessary to evaluate a candidate, it seems completely out of touch for Google to pass on an applicant with such an impressive background.

Not only that, but heaven knows that it takes a lot of dedication and leadership to lead an open source project from ideation to wide-spread use. If I were a startup founder, I would kill to get someone like him on my team.

It's more like not letting the CEO of your soccer ball manufacturer play on your team because he can't kick a soccer ball.

I don't see how this is relevant - in this case, a coder was rejected for a coding position. If we substitute your case, you could re-state it as "A player was rejected for defender" (or attacker/etc). In your example, you've changed that to "A manager was rejected for defender". Not the same.

>I think people were making fun of Google, because it is a caricature of their whole interview process.

To be honest, it kind of makes me wonder about the kind of code Google has, if this is a measure of a good coder. Are low level algorithms haphazardly re-implemented in python everywhere there is a need for one?

I've seen lots of code like that before. I was very unimpressed.

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