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Comment by Empact | Hacker News Reader

Throwback to that one time Google wouldn't hire @mxcl. ;) https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768

Well done Mike and contributors! It's a great piece of work.

It's hard for me to understand the issue with this. Google didn't hire the guy who wrote software that had a big impact on the community. Does it mean Google misses good engineers because of their less-than-ideal interview process, or simply Google hires only people who are a good fit for their organisation?

Writing the overly bitter tweet surely won't help with improving hiring points. Seems highly unprofessional and childish.

Well, he's at Apple now in charge of the Swift Package Manager, so I think he did okay.

He left.

Really? I didn't know that. I'm sure he has plenty of options though.

Source?

https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/773573824201699328

Thanks!

Looks like Google was onto something when they rejected him to start with...

Yeah I'm curious why he left. From what I could tell it sounded like changes in Swift took an act of congress basically. Which is fine, and how it should be, given how important it is to get it right. I wonder where he went.

My understanding is he just doesn't really know how to work in a big company.

Meh. I know "how to work in a big company" and choose not to. Talented people will always do whatever they want.

You choose not to, but you could if you wanted to, right? He apparently wanted to, otherwise he wouldn't have gone to Apple in the first place, but he just doesn't know how to work in a corporate environment. In fact, he says as much in this tweet: https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/773574683518119936

You seem to be looking at this through a somewhat unusual prism.

You and I both "know how" to eat discarded food out of a trash dumpster.

But absent some truly compelling reason, we wouldn't choose to do so, right?

That's really interesting. I love homebrew – it does exactly what it says on the tin and I've been using it for years at this point without any reason for complaint. User experience is certainly a part of that, it's very seldom I've found myself in a position where I have to resort to searching for support, since brew usually lets you know right in the terminal what went wrong, and how to fix it. It'll be interesting to see if this great user experience translates to the swift pkg manager.

I will just assert that at Googe scale (some 20000-30000 engineers from a quick search), "good fit" isn't really a thing. Now, it doesn't mean they might not be hiring a certain mono-culture type of programmers, but that might not be a "fit" issue (Disclaimer: I do think "good fit" is vaguely defined)

And I'd love to see a counter assertion/argument.

Is it even possible to have a monoculture with 20k–30k engineers?

Does it mean Google misses good engineers because of their less-than-ideal interview process

Google intentionally prefers false negatives to false positives.

They do have false positives. Quite a bit. They just fool themselves into thinking they minimize false positives by their hiring process.

I'm sorry, but I am sick and tired of "unprofessional" just thrown around like this. The person is a god damned human being, not a robot. They had just gone through an extremely frustrating experience with an unsatisfying conclusion. And it's Twitter.

The only one who's being unprofessional is the one chiding others for being "unprofessional".

I've never publicly called out a company that rejected me. It's not that hard to exercise some self-restraint.

Found the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9695102

He couldn't even ${college_level_gotcha}! No wonder he wasn't hired!

After it has been determined that there is a certain level of capacity to perform, then it should be about how excited they are to learn and integrate into the company's technology stack and culture. Technology stacks have become complex enough in recent years that it is a little bit unreasonable to expect a candidate to be familiar with all of it. The same way it is a little bit unreasonable that the developer would know or remember every college level gotcha you could throw their way.

For instance what if they code in such a way that they haven't run into that problem in years as it is internalised. Or maybe they make use of tools that eliminate a lot of problems, such as TypeScript or similar.

A good developer comes in many forms and increasingly often from all over the world.

According to him. The only context is one tweet from one side of the story.

After using the terrible piece of software that Homebrew is I don't blame them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com