4 ms·

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'v

by 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.
ryanobjc 10y ago
I guess I dont think anyone has EVER earned the right to have an "inflated self opinion". Acting like a jerk, being entitled and demanding things are never something earns. That's just not ok behavior. I talk to people about interview stuff, I notice that most people who say "I shouldn't have to know X" seem to be the least intellectually curious, least great problem solvers and just generally combative folks. If you are going into an interview with a serious chip on your shoulder, demanding a job, asking to exempt yourself from having to show problem solving skills, then just how is that going to work out? Regarding reversing a binary tree, yeah, the interviewer didn't expect you to know it. That's the point. It's something that's a little tricky, not impossible, requires you to be precise about memory ownership and pointers, and algorithmic. It takes no time at all to describe, and isn't impossible to solve. Yeah it's problem solving, but it's not random trivia. It's a functional test of your intelligence and yeah it filters out some who should be at Google, and they know it. However relaxing the bar is fraught with peril. You're quite literally banking the future of the company on it.
- gcp 10y ago
  You shouldn't have an inflated self opinion. (Duh!) But those were the words used to describe mxcl just because he opinionated that Google ought to have given him a more serious consideration given the software he had already produced. It's my opinion that wasn't an unreasonable assessment (from mxcl). Although if indeed nearly nobody at Google uses Homebrew, as now multiple people are claiming, it was, no matter how reasonable, wrong.
  - ryanobjc 10y ago
    So here's the thing.. he was given the STANDARD interview that every engineer has to pass. How was that not a serious consideration? How is it fair to his future potential colleagues that he got in "easy"? They need to depend on him and his problem solving abilities. I think he saw the question, and basically just refused to grapple with it, thinking it was below him, and then the rest pretty much was inevitable.
    - 10y ago

by gcp 10y ago

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.

ryanobjc 10y ago

I guess I dont think anyone has EVER earned the right to have an "inflated self opinion". Acting like a jerk, being entitled and demanding things are never something earns. That's just not ok behavior. I talk to people about interview stuff, I notice that most people who say "I shouldn't have to know X" seem to be the least intellectually curious, least great problem solvers and just generally combative folks. If you are going into an interview with a serious chip on your shoulder, demanding a job, asking to exempt yourself from having to show problem solving skills, then just how is that going to work out? Regarding reversing a binary tree, yeah, the interviewer didn't expect you to know it. That's the point. It's something that's a little tricky, not impossible, requires you to be precise about memory ownership and pointers, and algorithmic. It takes no time at all to describe, and isn't impossible to solve. Yeah it's problem solving, but it's not random trivia. It's a functional test of your intelligence and yeah it filters out some who should be at Google, and they know it. However relaxing the bar is fraught with peril. You're quite literally banking the future of the company on it.

gcp 10y ago
You shouldn't have an inflated self opinion. (Duh!) But those were the words used to describe mxcl just because he opinionated that Google ought to have given him a more serious consideration given the software he had already produced. It's my opinion that wasn't an unreasonable assessment (from mxcl). Although if indeed nearly nobody at Google uses Homebrew, as now multiple people are claiming, it was, no matter how reasonable, wrong.
- ryanobjc 10y ago
  So here's the thing.. he was given the STANDARD interview that every engineer has to pass. How was that not a serious consideration? How is it fair to his future potential colleagues that he got in "easy"? They need to depend on him and his problem solving abilities. I think he saw the question, and basically just refused to grapple with it, thinking it was below him, and then the rest pretty much was inevitable.
  - 10y ago