Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

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The problem is that Homebrew is very different from the sort of package management tasks that Google deals with. The design goals for Homebrew include: make it easy for users, make it not require root, make it work on Macs, handle dependencies robustly. If he were at Google it would be Linux-only, he'd be using Linux containerization extensively, he'd be deploying packages to thousands of machines instead of one, it'd be a virtual guarantee that some of the machines would fail during the installation process, there would be little or no user intervention and if there was a user it'd be a trained SRE, and the installation procedure would probably need to be an order of magnitude more efficient than Homebrew is.

I don't want to take away from his accomplishments as a programmer - I use Homebrew too. But my point is that it's very easy to see "Good programmer, of course he should get hired" from the outside, while the reality is that it may not be all that similar to the tasks he'd be doing.

If you are hiring the Homebrew dev, and your devs currently use Homebrew, why wouldn't you hire him to work on Homebrew for you?

> If you are hiring the Homebrew dev, and your devs currently use Homebrew, why wouldn't you hire him to work on Homebrew for you?

Macs account for something like 8% of the total marketplace of all PC's. For developers, they account for something like 20%... another 20% on Linux, and remainder on Windows or other.

So even if somehow having a paid Google employee work on Homebrew seemed advantageous, it would only benefit 20% of Google's staff, and 0% of the company itself (all Google servers are Linux).

Except that google 'banned' the use of windows internally a few years ago unless you had a really, really good reason for it.

Not sure what's the status of that ban (nor I care), but will skew the numbers enough to invalidate your point.

> enough to invalidate your point.

It might except ex-googlers in this thread of stated Google "banned" use of Homebrew internally. So the net benefit to the company and/or employees remains small to zero.

This is off topic though, since he was not being interviewed for homebrew development.

As far as I'm aware, Mac is just as 'banned' as Windows. Developers have Linux(Goobuntu) desktops and Mac, Linux, Windows or ChromeOS for laptops (which are primarily used as a terminal for your desktop).

actually internal sources tell me that Mac OS X is the dominant OS at Facebook, Google and Twitter, with a lot lot lot lot more than 20%

Last I knew, Google corporate Macs don't include Homebrew. (I left Google a year ago, things could've changed since then.) I'd be very surprised if it was allowed, I have an open-source project that's available via brew and I've had people at other companies tell me that anything brew-only is a complete non-starter at their company because Homebrew isn't allowed for security reasons, and Google cares a good deal about security.

I assume that the dev was referring to Googlers' personal laptops with the "90% of your devs use Homebrew". It's not unreasonable to estimate that 90% of Google engineers use a Mac as their personal machine, although 90% using Homebrew is probably an exaggeration. A lot of Googlers use their corp machine as their personal one (they're not supposed to, but it's hard to police when all you do is surf the web), and the majority of them don't have side projects outside of work. I didn't install Homebrew until after I left the company, since before then all my code belonged to Google.

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