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> But I didn't even apply. Perhaps this was a mistake on my part. I just had a feeling that my history of developing successful products for Google wouldn't cou

by jobu 10y ago

> But I didn't even apply. Perhaps this was a mistake on my part. I just had a feeling that my history of developing successful products for Google wouldn't count for much - that instead I'd get logic puzzles, quizzes about algorithmic minutiae and have to code a red-black tree on the spot on a whiteboard - all things that favor recent CS grads. Yes that seems to be how it works. https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768 https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768 "Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but you can’t invert a binary tree on a whiteboard so fuck off." My interview process with Google only made it to the technical phone screening because I didn't know the Big O complexity of read/write/sort for Trie structures. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trie) The interviewer was pretty cool and we had an interesting technical discussion, so I wouldn't consider it a complete waste of time.

honkhonkpants 10y ago
That guy outed himself as just the kind of jerk that hiring pipelines are designed to identify and reject. Inflated opinion of own importance, attitude of entitlement.
- kogepathic 10y ago
  > Inflated opinion of own importance Given that he develops software that Google engineers use frequently, I wouldn't exactly say he is inflating his sense of importance. It sounds like he is a good software developer who has developed something widely used and appreciated, but the Google hiring script doesn't deal well with those kind of people. It takes a lot of time and effort to go through interviews, I don't blame the guy for being pissed off that Google wasted his time.
  - kllrnohj 10y ago
    Just because a piece of software is frequently used doesn't mean the engineer that wrote it is top of the field. Calculator is a pretty widely used app, too, even by Google engineers. But that hardly qualifies the author to work at Google. Similarly while Homebrew is widely used and fits a need, it doesn't mean that the author is equipped with the skills that Google wants. A package manager and something like Google Brain don't exactly share much in common. It doesn't mean Google's script failed nor does it mean he shouldn't be pissed off, it's just how things are sometimes.
    - djtriptych 10y ago
      Just curious - have you ever worked at Google?
    - gcp 10y ago
      It was an excellent argument against "inflated opinion of self importance" though. If you write something that's as widely used by developers as homebrew, you've earned that right. So what if random Googlers could also have written it? They didn't.
      - DannyBee 10y ago
        "It was an excellent argument against "inflated opinion of self importance" though. If you write something that's as widely used by developers as homebrew, you've earned that right." No, you actually never earn that right. Seriously. In fact, it's a sign of good engineers that they just view their stuff as stuff, and not "well, i am doing the super important stuff, everyone else is not". Note that this is different than prioritizing, etc. If you have a bunch of high level engineers in a room, and they don't value each other's work (IE recognize that a lot of stuff is "important", and there stuff is just part of that) because they think the stuff they do is super-important, that's going to go very badly. At lower levels, pretty much none of it is so important that there is any value to having an inflated opinion of self importance. The fact that you've achieved adoption does not necessarily make you a good engineer.
        gcp 10y ago
        "well, i am doing the super important stuff, everyone else is not". Straw man argument. Nobody stated this. There's also a difference between thinking that your stuff is super important in isolation versus simply pointing out it's in wide use at a company and hence your previous efforts have in fact been productive and useful for them.
        DannyBee 10y ago
        "Straw man argument. Nobody stated this." This is pretty much exactly his attitude, even if he did not explicitly add the other 3 words. "in wide use at a company and hence your previous efforts have in fact been productive and useful for them." Except that assumes it's literally true. It's not, as a downvoted person said :) It also assumes that him working on it would be useful or productive relative to doing something else. That is also probably a negative.
  - honkhonkpants 10y ago
    The number of googlers who meaningfully "use" homebrew in the course of their work is probably 4 or another figure similarly close to zero, which should therefore be treated as zero. If it didn't exist and someone needed it, they would write it in a week. The number of googlers with Macs is not even 90% so this line of argument is just silly.
    - ryanobjc 10y ago
      As an engineer at Google, this comment is correct. Some teams use it, but since most the development happens on Linux desktops, and not Macs, therefore Homebrew is not as commonly used as normal dev shops. Basically the internal dev environment is already fully complete and works great. It's ultra custom and there are strict rules about bringing in open source code. The AGPL and GPL3 are good, but also one has to be wary about them in a commercial environment.
  - DannyBee 10y ago
    "Given that he develops software that Google engineers use frequently, I wouldn't exactly say he is inflating his sense of importance." Why? To quote one of the demotivational posters, "just because you are necessary doesn't mean you are important".
    - gcp 10y ago
      So is that, eh, the official Google stance on how they view their (prospective) employees? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12662182 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12662182 Cogs in a machine? https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0535/6917/products/worthdemotivator.jpeg?v=1414017066 https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0535/6917/products/worthde...
      - DannyBee 10y ago
        Yeah, that' totally the take-away message from that. Not "it's how i personally view the attitude that because what i did is used by a lot of people, i'm super-important".
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > Given that he develops software that Google engineers use frequently, I wouldn't exactly say he is inflating his sense of importance. He may be important as a person who has developed software used by a variety of people (including many at Google), but that doesn't mean he is someone who ought to be important for Google to employ.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Retric 10y ago
  "@PhilPlckthun it wasn't a joke, I was rejected this morning. But it was a flippant tweet." But, hey feel free to judge someone for gasp having a sense of humor more complex than a fart joke.
cromwellian 10y ago
i wouldn't expect someone to know how to derive big-o bounds, I'm 45, an engineer at google and I couldn't do it if asked on the spot. I would however expect you to know of the basic asymptotic performance of typical data structures and algorithms. As a practical matter I've seen a number of critical bugs in software because of mistakes in choosing data structures. As a side note, I joined Google at age 39.

by jobu 10y ago

honkhonkpants 10y ago

That guy outed himself as just the kind of jerk that hiring pipelines are designed to identify and reject. Inflated opinion of own importance, attitude of entitlement.

kogepathic 10y ago
> Inflated opinion of own importance Given that he develops software that Google engineers use frequently, I wouldn't exactly say he is inflating his sense of importance. It sounds like he is a good software developer who has developed something widely used and appreciated, but the Google hiring script doesn't deal well with those kind of people. It takes a lot of time and effort to go through interviews, I don't blame the guy for being pissed off that Google wasted his time.
- kllrnohj 10y ago
  Just because a piece of software is frequently used doesn't mean the engineer that wrote it is top of the field. Calculator is a pretty widely used app, too, even by Google engineers. But that hardly qualifies the author to work at Google. Similarly while Homebrew is widely used and fits a need, it doesn't mean that the author is equipped with the skills that Google wants. A package manager and something like Google Brain don't exactly share much in common. It doesn't mean Google's script failed nor does it mean he shouldn't be pissed off, it's just how things are sometimes.
  - djtriptych 10y ago
    Just curious - have you ever worked at Google?
  - gcp 10y ago
    It was an excellent argument against "inflated opinion of self importance" though. If you write something that's as widely used by developers as homebrew, you've earned that right. So what if random Googlers could also have written it? They didn't.
    - DannyBee 10y ago
      "It was an excellent argument against "inflated opinion of self importance" though. If you write something that's as widely used by developers as homebrew, you've earned that right." No, you actually never earn that right. Seriously. In fact, it's a sign of good engineers that they just view their stuff as stuff, and not "well, i am doing the super important stuff, everyone else is not". Note that this is different than prioritizing, etc. If you have a bunch of high level engineers in a room, and they don't value each other's work (IE recognize that a lot of stuff is "important", and there stuff is just part of that) because they think the stuff they do is super-important, that's going to go very badly. At lower levels, pretty much none of it is so important that there is any value to having an inflated opinion of self importance. The fact that you've achieved adoption does not necessarily make you a good engineer.
      - gcp 10y ago
        "well, i am doing the super important stuff, everyone else is not". Straw man argument. Nobody stated this. There's also a difference between thinking that your stuff is super important in isolation versus simply pointing out it's in wide use at a company and hence your previous efforts have in fact been productive and useful for them.
        DannyBee 10y ago
        "Straw man argument. Nobody stated this." This is pretty much exactly his attitude, even if he did not explicitly add the other 3 words. "in wide use at a company and hence your previous efforts have in fact been productive and useful for them." Except that assumes it's literally true. It's not, as a downvoted person said :) It also assumes that him working on it would be useful or productive relative to doing something else. That is also probably a negative.
- honkhonkpants 10y ago
  The number of googlers who meaningfully "use" homebrew in the course of their work is probably 4 or another figure similarly close to zero, which should therefore be treated as zero. If it didn't exist and someone needed it, they would write it in a week. The number of googlers with Macs is not even 90% so this line of argument is just silly.
  - ryanobjc 10y ago
    As an engineer at Google, this comment is correct. Some teams use it, but since most the development happens on Linux desktops, and not Macs, therefore Homebrew is not as commonly used as normal dev shops. Basically the internal dev environment is already fully complete and works great. It's ultra custom and there are strict rules about bringing in open source code. The AGPL and GPL3 are good, but also one has to be wary about them in a commercial environment.
- DannyBee 10y ago
  "Given that he develops software that Google engineers use frequently, I wouldn't exactly say he is inflating his sense of importance." Why? To quote one of the demotivational posters, "just because you are necessary doesn't mean you are important".
  - gcp 10y ago
    So is that, eh, the official Google stance on how they view their (prospective) employees? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12662182 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12662182 Cogs in a machine? https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0535/6917/products/worthdemotivator.jpeg?v=1414017066 https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0535/6917/products/worthde...
    - DannyBee 10y ago
      Yeah, that' totally the take-away message from that. Not "it's how i personally view the attitude that because what i did is used by a lot of people, i'm super-important".
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > Given that he develops software that Google engineers use frequently, I wouldn't exactly say he is inflating his sense of importance. He may be important as a person who has developed software used by a variety of people (including many at Google), but that doesn't mean he is someone who ought to be important for Google to employ.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Retric 10y ago
"@PhilPlckthun it wasn't a joke, I was rejected this morning. But it was a flippant tweet." But, hey feel free to judge someone for gasp having a sense of humor more complex than a fart joke.

cromwellian 10y ago

i wouldn't expect someone to know how to derive big-o bounds, I'm 45, an engineer at google and I couldn't do it if asked on the spot. I would however expect you to know of the basic asymptotic performance of typical data structures and algorithms. As a practical matter I've seen a number of critical bugs in software because of mistakes in choosing data structures. As a side note, I joined Google at age 39.