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Comment by rawnlq | Hacker News Reader

Google internal libraries and infrastructure are very good and way better than most "off the shelf" libraries.

Any rank and file engineer can and do contribute to them. In that case I don't see why they should lower their bar to people who can merely consume these libraries when they can take their pick at people who can do both.

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I've seen GWT, and Angular 2.0, they're not any better than other open source frameworks, and many would say they're much worse

Ha, yeah, if they could let some of that "magical internal tools" goodness seep out into the Android SDK I'd be pretty happy, since there's no sign of anything special there now, to put it mildly. Failing that, just buy Square and hand the whole thing over to them, since they seem to have a much better idea of how to write useful, usable, capable tools on the platform than Google does. Please.

> Google internal libraries and infrastructure are very good and way better than most "off the shelf" libraries.

Citations needed.

As much as I'd like to see them as well, I'd imagine we won't get much as that's Google's IP, but would love to know generically if that's true from anyone who has worked with said libraries.

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/base/+/master

Are you trying to make a point?

Well for one, see Guava and a bunch of the stuff that has been rolled into java proper over the years.

What is the equivalent that it is much better than?

Seems to be a competitor to Apache Commons, can decide for yourself whether or not you think it's better.

Apache Commons (Collections and some others) is a very old, basically legacy library, they are not nearly equivalent in terms of functionality so comparing them makes no sense. Google Guava is a nice library but it doesn't have any alternatives that I know of so it can not be used as an example to support the above generalization (which would need many examples to hold any weight anyway).

Angular vs React is a counterexample I can think of. Angular is shit.

The point was that their interview doesn't select for "ability to contribute to the company libraries" at all. It selects for "went to Stanford or MIT and has a good ability to memorize abstract computer science material."

These are only loosely related.

You seem to have some sort of disdain for "abstract computer science material".

Not at all. I love abstract computer science. I find it very interesting.

The point is that the job of "software engineer" is not the same as the job of "computer science professor." The required skill profiles are almost totally different. They require mostly disjoint skillsets, despite having some overlap.

If you're interviewing candidates to be a computer science professor at a university, then it is entirely appropriate to quiz them about abstract computer science during their interview.

Google, and other tech companies that inteview like them, are using a "CS professor" interview process to hire "software engineers." That's my point.

The material you get in interviews isn't CS professor level; it's basic undergrad algorithms level. It's a fundamental course in any CS degree, not just at elite universities.

> You seem to have some sort of disdain for "abstract computer science material".

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12654399

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