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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

Almost none of them could get a job as a software engineer at their own company, if they had to, because they would be completely unqualified.

There are 10 CEO level people mentioned.

Woz could certainly get a job at Apple. He's clearly brilliant and capable.

Larry & Sergey could definitely get jobs at Google. They were PhD CS students at Stanford (how on Earth is that "unqualified" to you?).

Zuckerberg could get a job at Facebook. He obviously wrote a lot of Facebook's early code.

Gates & Allen allegedly didn't do much actual coding themselves but they certainly understood it. I imagine Jobs, Bezos and Jack Ma also understood coding even if they didn't do any themselves. I don't know anything about Ma Huateng.

I doubt any of them could drop in to a high level coding role and be productive, but they could all do intern or junior level stuff. Code isn't that hard that you need to be a special snowflake to do it.

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> He obviously wrote a lot of Facebook's early code.

Have you seen Facebook's early code? It's very much "Early 2000s PHP spaghetti written by undergrad on a caffeine bender at 3 am". Facebook succeeded because of catching lightning in a bottle at the right place/time, and sure, later engineers built it to scale, but let's not kid ourselves that it was due to Zuck's coding genius.

Is Facebook's early code available someplace online?

> Zuckerberg could get a job at Facebook. He obviously wrote a lot of Facebook's early code. > Gates & Allen allegedly didn't do much actual coding themselves but they certainly understood it.

What? Gates & Allen similarly wrote "a lot of early code". Gates also acted as a Chief Software Architect in his final days at Microsoft.

My understanding is that the last application code Gates was involved in was the TRS-80 Model 100 [1] circa 1982; I taught my kids assembly on the Model 100 and think it's great.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100#ROM_firmware

Allen and gates where writing code when they were in highschool when no one was writing code. They also also got 1590 and 1600 on theirs sats when it used to be super hard. These are super smart and motivated people. You don't they could master leetcode after a few weeks of practice?

You are assuming a lot. Many stanford phd's fail the google interview. I'd guess larry, sergey and zuckerberg had a pretty good chance of failing their own swe interviews...

You are assuming a lot. Many stanford phd's /dont/ fail the google interview. I'd guess larry, sergey and zuckerberg had a pretty good chance of /passing/ their own swe interviews...

You might be semi joking, so apologies if I took it too literally: I'm assuming nothing really. And we are saying almost the exact same thing. Many pass, many fail. Pretty good chance of succeeding, pretty good chance of failing.

Maybe the issue is with the Google interview?

I mean, plenty of very capable people are filtered out of Google and go on to do great things. It is bound to happen when you receive hundreds of applications and hire one person.

I am assuming a lot, but everything I've read about Larry, Sergey and Zuck tells me that they're pretty exceptional people (even if that doesn't extend to their coding ability, which I have no idea about). They're people who are driven, focused and hugely ambitious. If they don't have what it takes to pass a SWE interview then there's little hope for the rest of us.

I think the point is, that even if they are intelligent and capable and definitely contributed a lot to their initial codebases ( I don't know why you singled out Gates, but he most certainly did as well), all of these companies grew to the point where almost any code change requires a bunch of expertise with technologies that they probably have not been exposed to.

I don't know if they wouldn't get hired, I mean it's not like those companies never hire straight out of college, they obviously do, so expertise is not an absolute requirement. But they probably couldn't be hired as drop-in experienced SE's. Half their tech stacks are on technology that didn't even exist when they last touched code.

All of these CEO's are famous for their excellent early talent acquisition of software engineers. Microsoft and Apple for leveraging those engineers to initiate a new digital world, and Facebook and Google for attracting (and motivating) the worlds best to achieve global domination.

But they probably couldn't be hired as drop-in experienced SE's.

That's exactly what I said in my first post - "I doubt any of them could drop in to a high level coding role and be productive, but they could all do intern or junior level stuff."

If this is the standard that "they couldn't get hired TODAY" I'm sure that's not a very interesting fact worth discussing.

I mean if we reanimated Big Al Einstein today and he had a blind interview for a tenure track physics position at Princeton Physics dept he would probably fail. The field has changed too much although with months of prep he'd be able to catch up, the same as L & S could for SWE interviews.

The dirty truth is that most whiteboard industries are heavily loaded on raw cognitive ability. Sure, it’s ostensibly about data structures, but what it’s really about is fluid intelligence. Gates, Zuckerberg, Larry, Sergey and Bezos all have extremely high intelligence, and would most likely pass with ease.

I agree with you, and I think that this "dirty turth" is unpopular, because lots of people want to feel bright and intelligent, but the algorithm interviews, when interpreted in this way, tells them they're not that super bright -- and they don't like that, so they want to interpret the interviews in other ways, eg it's just luck, or anyone can do it with enough practice or things like that.

At the same time, I think the coding interviews generally are harder than what's needed to do the job well, just because there're so many job applicants so the bar gets unnecessarily high? And people who fail the interviews can still be really bright. (Also, some people get nervous and fail mostly related to that. I wonder how to avoid that happening)

What? You honestly think the Stanford PhDs who created Google couldn't get hired as basic SWEs? Seriously? I mean if true that says a lot more about the SWE interviews than it does about Stanford PhDs.

I mean there are Yale JDs that fail the bar exam but no one would claim that the average Yale JD couldn't get hired as a Big Law associate or judicial clerk.

In a very literal sense, that's exactly what's broken about the interview process in the software industry. The philosophy is to avoid false positives at all costs, so a high rate of false negatives is seen as OK. The prevailing advice is, just try your luck again in six months.

That's the good thing about Bitcoin. I don't have to prove anything to anyone anymore. It doesn't matter where you work if you convert your fiat to the superior store of value

> You honestly think the Stanford PhDs who created Google couldn't get hired as basic SWEs? Seriously?

They would definitely get a phone screen based on their resumes, but there is a good chance they wouldn't even make it to the virtual onsite round. It's not like the interviewers would use their products or look at their code or dissertation or whatever.

Google famously refused to hire Max Howell, the programmer who wrote Homebrew, which (based on Google's own statements) was used by 90% of Google's engineers at the time of his interview, because he couldn't invert a binary tree in the specific (but unstated) manner that the interviewer wanted. So it's definitely possible, indeed likely, that Serge and Larry wouldn't get hired at the Google of today.

The "average Yale JD" would not get hired as a judicial clerk. Competition for clerkships is fierce, and generally only the top students get them. Any judge would probably take a "top" Yale JD, but unless the judge is a Yale graduate they'll all pass on the "average Yale JD," in favor of a better-performing graduate from another law school (usually their own).

I don't know about the rest of that, but

> Homebrew, which was used by 90% of Google's engineers at the time of his interview

This is definitely not true.

I don't know how true the % is, but that is what Howell claimed and several Google employees verified that his software was used by significant parts of Google's engineering staff.

At any rate, the point is that a guy who used software used by a large portion of Google's engineering team because it was superior to the in-house solution could not get a job at Google because he failed to answer a programming question in the specific manner the interviewer wanted for a type of problem he would never actually encounter on the job. And in that vein, Sergie and Larry would similarly have difficulty getting hired at Google because other than their original algorithm, which Google has not used in over a decade, they have no modern or recent software experience and would likely fail all of the programming interviews.

> At any rate, the point is that a guy who used software used by a large portion of Google's engineering team because it was superior to the in-house solution

Do you seriously believe that they couldn't come up with something better than mediocre package manager?

Based on Google's track record the past few years, Yes, I seriously believe that Google could not come up with a better package manager. They've taken 6 shots at a basic messaging application and they still haven't gotten that right. 4 attempts at a payment application. Stadia. Wear. Nest (post-acquistion). The had 1 shot with Stadia to do it right and they fucked it up so badly that it's impacting Google's ability to sell other services to prospective business partners because prospective clients rightly doubt Google's ability to launch and maintain a product.

The real question is: knowing Google's track record of almost complete failure for the past few years, why would you believe in Google?

And again, do you seriously believe that any of this has to do with engineering and not lack of business vision?

Based on the bugginess of Maps, Duo, Hangouts, Wear, Stadia, and other products, I would say that the poor engineering is almost as much a factor of these failures as the lack of business vision. After all, the product doesn't need to work well for the PM to get promoted. It just needs to exist.

Google is run by the engineers. You don't get to blame the MBAs for its failures.

> Based on the bugginess of Maps, Duo, Hangouts, Wear, Stadia, and other products

What are your sources?

People at Google use blaze. I've never heard of anyone using homebrew. I think number is quite near 0%.

It's hard to put everything in a build system like blaze but if you do, I think the outcome is superior to Homebrew.

I have never worked at Google, but around 2015 everyone I knew working there was using Homebrew if they used Mac for development. Moreover, there were quite a bit of HN and Reddit discussion about this incident at the time, and a number of Google engineers confirmed that Homebrew was in widespread use among the Mac-based developers.

I have no idea how great a developer Howell is, but it's simply not true that Homebrew was used by many Google employees. I was at Google at that time (2015), had a macbook for several years, and had never even heard of Homebrew.

Google is a linux shop, and you were generally not allowed to even keep the source code in your notebook.

Where would one keep the source code then - if not locally?

Either in a desktop sitting securely under your desk at office, or "in the cloud". You would remotely connect to them to do your development. (Most of Google binaries I saw were way too heavy to run on a Macbook, anyway.) Macbooks were just for checking email, calendar, or similar stuff.

All code at google is built from source from a single mono repo with a one version rule. Approximately zero googlers use homebrew since almost no development is done on macs and there is no need for packages management.

You're forgetting less famous reply of Max Howell on quora: https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin....

Ok that makes more sense

> But ultimately, should Google have hired me? Yes, absolutely yes. I am often a dick, I am often difficult

If any of the interviewers got a whiff of that, it could have easily torpedoed the interview loop.

He wasn’t asked to invert a binary tree. This was an exaggeration in his pissed off post.

His post also makes him sound like a dick (which he admits). Google has a “no jerks” policy that a lot of people take seriously.

I literally mean there is a good chance they'd fail. Is it 30%? 60%? I'm not sure, but it's not as low as you might expect.

Many stanford phds fail the interview process. I'm not speculating. Others have suggested this says more about the interview process than the person in question. They might be right. But here we are.

What is this bizarro world where Gates didn't do much coding but Zuckerberg bootstrapping a PHP CRUD app would get him in the door at today's Facebook?

Agreed, Gates was a brilliant coder for any other faults. He'd probably need to catch up on tech, but could easily then get a very senior engineering job at Microsoft or anywhere else, if he managed to escape the ageism trap.

Zuckerberg, on the other hand, partly coded a CRUD PHP app before moving on to executive stuff. He would probably not pass a Facebook interview without several years of intense preparation.

Brin and Page fall in between those two. They at least have several years of academic coding and their early Google work.

Yes, they're all very smart, but that's not enough to get into most FANG software engineering jobs.

> Zuckerberg could get a job at Facebook. He obviously wrote a lot of Facebook's early code.

That doesn't mean he could do leetcode problems.

Not to be "that guy", but he'd have to get past the HR filter first and if I remember correctly, Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard. Without a college degree, it's very difficult to get past the HR filter in and of itself to even get to the interview to solve those problems.

The OP’s point is that education or not, if you’ve been out of practice for decades, none of these companies will hire you as an SWE.

Hell, the type of attitudes and personality that made these folks good at what they did would probably be liabilities from some the interview process.

> but they could all do intern or junior level stuff.

Almost certainly true, but would they pass the coding interview?

Underlining this point. The claim isn't that they couldn't work in the field. It is that they could have trouble in the interview.

I'm not clear why/if this is controversial. I thought it was well established that interviews are tough from both ends and that they suffer heavily from Goodhart's law.

Zuck wouldn’t. He’s a Mediocre engineer by his own admission. It’s a myth that he was an autistic genius. The engineering questions at fb aren’t trivial.

Gates & Allen didn't do much coding? Gates wrote most of the first version of DOS and lots of other software.

I believe you are thinking of Microsoft BASIC? MS-DOS was bought by microsoft from another company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS#History

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