3 ms·
Ah yes, people do bring this case up. However, they don't usually remember that Homebrew at that point was a poor and incomplete reimplementation of other packa
by dozzie 9y ago
Ah yes, people do bring this case up. However, they don't usually remember
that Homebrew at that point was a poor and incomplete reimplementation of
other package managers, used to break installed software on updates, and the
fact that the very team that was maintaining Homebrew was not competent enough
to either manage SSL certificate for their website properly or at least admit
that it was a bug.
The sole fact that people use your software doesn't mean that you're
competent, similarly to your inability to work with data structures on
a whiteboard not meaning that you're incompetent. Somehow people only remember
about the latter part for Homebrew.
- josefresco 9y ago"The sole fact that people use your software doesn't mean that you're competent" It means something else, which may actually be more valuable than being a "competent software engineer" in the eyes of a specific company.
- vkou 9y agoMillions of people have used bad or buggy products for decades, but that doesn't mean that you want to hire the engineers who built them, no more then you want to hire lottery winners (For being lucky!).
- josefresco 9y agoAuthors of widely successful but "buggy" software are now lottery winners? My point was that these "unqualified" engineers clearly have something that separates themselves from even "genius" engineers. Hustle (to name one trait) matters, sometimes more than qualification and academic credentials.
- vkou 9y agoNo, but if being an author of successful software makes you a good employee (Because surely, that success is wholly transitive), then being a lottery winner would too. (After all, you were lucky - and it's good to hire lucky people.) Put another way - does being a security engineer for Equifax make you an obvious hire at Google? I mean, every American Google employee has used Equifax's credit report systems, or used a bank that uses Equifax's credit report systems - clearly, said security engineer knows what he's doing.
- josefresco 9y agoEquifax's ubiquitousness is not a direct result or byproduct of the engineer's work.
- vkou 9y agoAnd neither is the ubiquity of any one particular software product. There are always factors beyond 'Was Bob a good engineer.' 95% of businesses exclusively used Windows in the early 2000s, but that doesn't mean that you should blindly hire anyone who worked on it. The author of that blog post wrote Homebrew. Thousands of engineers use it on a daily basis. That's great. I use thousands of pieces of software, worked on by hundreds of thousands of people, on a daily basis. That doesn't mean I should skip the interview process, and hire all of them. Some of those people are rock stars. Some... Are awful developers.