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Comment by physicsguy | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of the guy who created Homebrew being rejected by Google for failing some silly Leetcode puzzle.

Which is not something that happened, even according to Max Howell himself: https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin...

> I feel bad about my tweet, I don’t feel it was fair, and it fed the current era of outragism-driven-reading that is the modern Internet, and thus went viral, and for that I am truly sorry.

it kind of happened, he went through seven interviews. from the same post:

> But ultimately, should Google have hired me? Yes, absolutely yes. I am often a dick, I am often difficult, I often don’t know computer science, but. BUT. I make really good things, maybe they aren't perfect, but people really like them. Surely, surely Google could have used that.

The #1 way to not get hired is to be a dick. The brilliant asshole is the most toxic person you can have on your team. Don’t be an asshole.

Founders of a lot of companies also tend to be dicks. But seems to do alright. Seems to be a double standard there

Exactly this. No amount of cred, smarts, and genius that ends with "and I'm a bit of dick" will save you from my automatic red-line veto when hiring. I'm far from alone in this.

> will save you from my automatic red-line veto when hiring

You're literally a power tripping dick hiding behind "I'm not letting other dicks in" facade.

You've got it backwards friend

umm, linus torvalds, richard stallman, elon musk to name a few

None of those people ever applied for a job at Big Corp where one of the most important aspects is to be able to work well with other people and tactfully navigate the social structure of the company.

being a dick has not hindered there prospects. id argue dickheads are more prevalent in tech due to the prevalence of autism

Nobody is saying it hinders their prospects in general. They're just saying that "being a dick" is incompatible with a specific kind of job: one that requires collaborative and cooperative work with other people and navigating the social hierarchy of a company.

In my experience, it's the nice people that get fired and the assholes that get promoted. It's not exactly a secret that silicon valley is full of arrogant assholes.

Not everyone is a great fit for big companies. Not everyone is a great fit for startups. Not everyone is great at being a small business owner. And not everyone is great at being a regular employee.

Point is that Linus would be fucking miserable and ineffective at a generic BigTech co. He’d hate every second of it. And that’s ok!

I mean, he's also the same guy who apparently thought "Unix ideas that have worked for literally decades, nah fuck that. I know better".

It took over a decade before the project made some improvement on how the default install path is handled.

To my knowledge it still has absolutely atrocious dependency resolution relative to things like DPKG.

Not hiring this guy is honestly like a fancy restaurant not hiring the guy who comes up with the new McDonalds obesity burger special menu. What he created is popular, it's not good.

Google is not a fancy restaurant. Five-guys private consultancy is a fancy restaurant. Google is the McDonalds of all McDonaldses, it makes software that is used by everybody, whether they want it or not, and you can't turn a corner without hitting something they control.

> I make really good things, maybe they aren't perfect, but people really like them. Surely, surely Google could have used that.

This line could apply to millions of people around the globe.

> I am often a dick

It make things really nice and easy when someone tells me enough about themselves in just a few words to make me not want to work with them.

Maybe that's why he didn't get hired? His dickishness came through in the interviews?

I don't think most people who behave in this manner have enough self-reflection to write something like that. They would rather write that they are opinionated, principled or decisive or some other bs.

Building popular software doesn't mean you're a good programmer, especially since at that point Google was looking heavily at CS concepts and he admittedly wasn't good at that.

It's also possible he would have been hired if he applied for L-1. A lot of people get an ego check applying to Google where they're a senior staff engineer or a CTO at a small company and get an L5 offer.

Are people who don't work for Google supposed to understand what these levels mean?

True but surprisingly grinding leetcode puzzles also doesn't mean you're a good programmer. In fact, in my decades-long now programming career, I've had to take many more decisions of the homebrew kind (e.g. how the thing is going to work, how the API is going to look like, will the users love or hate that feature, etc.) than the leetcode kind. And now I am thinking the former is even more important. If you get the leetcode part wrong, worst thing your code would be slow. Not a good thing but also not a complete disaster - you can come back and optimize later. If you screw up the design and interface part, nobody would be using it - or worse, they'd be using it in ways it wasn't supposed to be used - and then it doesn't matter how fast it is.

> True but surprisingly grinding leetcode puzzles also doesn't mean you're a good programmer.

I don't think anybody with a modicum of experience finds this surprising at all.

Or the FastAPI creator not having enough years of experience with FastAPI according to a job posting.

That is the most absolutely absurd wild damn story that I have written.

Care to provide links...

How can interviewers be such stupid, the fastapi creator had the MOST experience with it, he created it..

https://x.com/tiangolo/status/1281946592459853830

Edit: note that I wrote "according to a job posting". It's not the same as the situation in the parent comment.

https://x.com/tiangolo/status/1281946592459853830?lang=en

Homebrew is “just” a package manager, not the core of part of Google. They could rip it out overnight and won’t even notice it. And Google gave him a fair shot.

This guy got rejected by some automated system without even interview.

So, was he rejected by an automated system or did he go thru seven interviews, as other commenters say?

You might have missed the subtle wording;

_That_ guy (Howell) got several rounds of interviews, _this_ guy (OP) got rejected by an automated system.

Not the "subtle" but simply, inaccurate wording then

Not inaccurate; it's perfectly understandable to a native English speaker, the nuance is subtle, "this guy", "him/that guy", but it is clear and commonly used language.

"I just spoke to a guy about X, his opinion was different to the guy I spoke to about it last week. This guy said Y, but that guy insisted it was Z."

GP is talking about two different people.

"Him" is the creator of Homebrew. Seven interviews at Google.

"This guy" is the creator of enigo (discussed in this thread). Automatic rejection by Anthropic.

(Edit: upon page reload i saw the quicker answer.)

Does 7 interviews not seem excessive? Got my current job with 1.

Silicon Valley lives in lalaland.

7 is a bit excessive but it might be including team matching which is a bit more informal and less obnoxious than the leetcode style interviews

> Homebrew is “just” a package manager, not the core of part of Google.

Yes, this. Sometimes I wonder if those coming up with the Homebrew example have any experience whatsoever with software development. I mean, sure the project is popular and surely doesn't hurt on a resume. But does it showcase any level of technical expertise or mastery? No, I'm afraid not. I would bet that the majority of software engineers would be able to put together an equivalent system in a week or so. Think about it, and pay attention to what are the system's usecases. It's hardly rocket science.

>does it showcase any level of technical expertise or mastery? No, I'm afraid not.

But it does show that he can develop and ship a popular product, something outside the capability of so many “great engineers”. Good luck generating any revenue on the backs of smart engineers that have no stomach for understanding the nuance of development over and above writing and checking in code.

It says nothing about fitting office culture of Google, or generating successful projects, for that matter. If he’s so good, how come there’s nothing else besides brew?

> But it does show that he can develop and ship a popular product, something outside the capability of so many “great engineers”.

Does it, though? I mean, the key differentiating factor is being able to stomach the cloud infrastructure costs. The vast majority of cloud engineers already work on far more complex systems as part of their day-to-day activities. What exactly do you think that putting together something a kin to a file hosting service places you above any other candidate?

I was thinking about this the other day. I think it might just be a thing of Google looking for a different thing than what made his open source project famous.

Without no knowledge of the details further than mxcl's tweet; probably any performance issues even on simple code, get infinitely multiplied when running at Google's scale, slogging the thing, on Google's dime. From what I've seen of him, mxcl is good at designing a really approachable product, and on running an open source project. But homebrew is really slow, even on the latests Macs, even for basic cases.

To me it seems then that he'd be more fit for a product owner/manager position than an engineering one, and that could be the root of his not-hiring.

This guy is so full of himself, no wonder he didnt get hired. Just read the homebrew github issues / forum and you will see what i mean…

This story feels after all the years still awkward. Many people at Google don't have anything that impressive on their resume like being the creator of homebrew. Commentary like "Google looks only for computer scientists, so you need to have studied CS" is so out of touch that i sometimes questions if these people ever worked in a big corporation. There are thousands of different roles, many multiple times suited for that guy. I suspect the people who vetoed didn't like that guy for some other reasons.

Iirc the homebrew guy did at least get an interview

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