8 ms·

I still can't get over the fact that Google rejected mxcl, author of homebrew, possibly the most important piece of software on OSX, because he couldn't remembe

by sho 8y ago

I still can't get over the fact that Google rejected mxcl, author of homebrew, possibly the most important piece of software on OSX, because he couldn't remember some useless piece of easily-googleable (ha) CS trivia on the spot. Even though they all run it internally. If that isn't the purest, most concentrated form of arbitrary, blind, own-goal beaureaucratic corporate idiocy I don't know what is. And people actually try to emulate their interview practises.

aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
>Even though they all run it internally. I bet many Google projects also use `leftpad` internally.
pmden 8y ago
"possibly the most important piece of software on OSX" I'm earnestly trying to avoid downplaying his work, but it's only a package manager. Unless he was interviewing to be Google's next head of package management on OSX, I'm not sure why you think assessing him on something other than his useful side project is bad form. I'm also not certain how an answer being 'easily-googleable' makes it arbitrary or pointless. Someone had to write that answer on Stack Overflow, and the chances are you'd rather hire that guy.
- electrograv 8y ago
  > I'm earnestly trying to avoid downplaying his work, but it's only a package manager. I'm earnestly trying to avoid downplaying your comment, but you sound like you have no clue how much engineering effort and talent is actually required to build and maintain a reliable, functional, production-grade package manager that a huge number of people use. Being able to completely implement and support a sophisticated software product end-to-end is a FAR better indicator of engineering talent than isolated algorithm puzzles on a whiteboard. Whiteboard problems are used in interviews simply because individually executed complete projects are so rare (at all, let alone publicly visible). In fact, whiteboard interviews have all but been proven to be among the least useful at distinguishing good vs bad candidates. The only reason it works is because everyone knows it's a game, studies the game, and gets tested at the same game. It's essentially a disguised IQ test that you have to study for. The problem is, if you don't study for it specifically, you're at a huge disadvantage. This leads to famous engineers (clearly talented) getting rejected because they don't practice jumping through the particular hoops the company makes everyone jump through. It seems there are more than several cases where Google needs a high profile engineer more than that engineer needs Google, and as a result the engineer doesn't study the hoop-jumping Google wants. Google rejects them out of bureaucratic process, and loses out on a good hire. On the opposite side: I'm not a famous engineer, so I suck it up and practice whiteboard algorithm problems like most everyone else -- and as a result, I've never had a problem passing coding interviews. But just because most everyone jumps through hoops to play the game, doesn't mean everyone should have to.
  - godot 8y ago
    To add to your points, the problem is not just missing good engineers because they don't study and play the game, but also hiring bad engineers because they study and play the game. I personally know of people who habitually study FAANG interview questions, and make it their career to jump ship every few years for salary boosts. I've worked with some of these people; while they are nice and friendly folks and I consider some of them good friends of mine, they are much less-good engineers compared to many others I know, who stay in smaller startups and want to get things done and don't want to play the interview game.
    - diracpam 8y ago
      I'm one such 'engineer' who is good at whiteboarding algorithms. I can do well on 'system design' questions but dont feel confident at all about really designing such a system from ground up. I, for one, am glad that I can find gainful employment by memorizing 200 pages.
      - jimjansen1 8y ago
        I applaud your honesty. There is a bizarre religion on HN where people think that doing well at Whiteboard/algo interviews makes you a good engineer or is somehow crucial to recruiting good talent.
      - vanderZwan 8y ago
        I'm happy for you, but I hope you're also that honest with yourself and your employers about your limits when they want you to built something that you know is over your head
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    > I'm earnestly trying to avoid downplaying your comment, but you sound like you have no clue how much engineering effort and talent is actually required to build and maintain a reliable, functional, production-grade package manager that a huge number of people use. It's also entirely possible that Google saw Homebrew as neither reliable, functional, or production-grade enough for their taste. While Homebrew is somewhat decent today (though, it's still broken in some ways that I will not go into here and I'm under the impression that it's being worked on), but it wasn't always particularly reliable or stable. The only real benefit it had (and arguably still has) is that it has massive traction.
- linkregister 8y ago
  > I'm earnestly trying to avoid downplaying his work, but it's only a package manager. I don't really know what to tell you, except I feel like you may be new to software engineering or have forgotten much of what goes into it. The vast majority of engineers at Google will never lead a software project with the utility and breadth of use as the most popular package manager for mac OS for almost a decade. Most engineers at Google will contribute to a small portion of software that will be run by a large fraction of the planet's computers, but owning the architecture, project management, testing, community support, and coding? No. A package manager that works as well as brew (though it's not without its faults!) is non-trivial to say the least. We suffered through fink, and things got better with macports. But brew clearly works better. It's reasonable for a company to reject a new graduate applicant based on their freezing during an interview, for an algorithm that is part of freshman year courses in Computer Science. It's also reasonable for us to comment on the absurdity of a company making the same determination for a senior software engineer at a top software company, the vast majority of whom do not touch binary trees for an entire career! If a Google engineer were to reimplement a binary tree or quicksort in a backend service, that code would fail code review with the comment: "use the library." > Someone had to write that answer on Stack Overflow, and the chances are you'd rather hire that guy. The popularity of his tweet indicates that no, chances are that engineers interviewing Max Howell would absolutely choose him over a binary-tree-implementer. Evidence indicates your viewpoint is in the minority.
  - sethammons 8y ago
    I think you answered it yourself. His skill set (running, managing, community, etc) are not what Google needs (as they see it). They need someone who "will contribute to a small portion of software that will be run by a large fraction of the planet's computers, but owning the architecture, project management, testing, community support, and coding? No."
    - vonmoltke 8y ago
      Your "etc" includes writing the damn thing in the first place, which indicates he is more than qualified for "will contribute to a small portion of software that will be run by a large fraction of the planet's computers". Furthermore, for L5 and up Google is most certainly looking for systems design and engineering leadership skills.
- gamesbrainiac 8y ago
  Package manages often determine the success of an entire ecosystem. To give you an idea of how hard this is, Go still has not been able to come up with proper package management. Some of the best engineers in the world built that language.
  - dwild 8y ago
    > Package manages often determine the success of an entire ecosystem. Nobody said it wasn't great, just that whether he is good to make a package manager, doesn't determine if he is a good fit for anything else. If that hiring position was to build a system to manage packages, sure, he is probably the best hire for that, but theses skills are specific to exactly this task. A great interviewer though would have kept his contact information though and would have tried to put him somewhere else though. He may have not been a good fit for what they were looking for, but they can clearly use his skill in some ways some where else.
    - swat535 8y ago
      You're absolutely right. the best metric is to see how quickly he can reverse a binary tree. now that is grounds for instant dismissal !
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    macOS had multiple package managers prior to Homebrew.
    - mratzloff 8y ago
      And they sucked.
- sergiotapia 8y ago
  You're acting like all the engineers at Google work on search algorithms and incredibly research-focused work. I bet you they still have the footsoldiers out there building consumer facing products. You're telling me the guy who built Homebrew can't sprinkle some awesome dev ux to some of Google's tools?
theamk 8y ago
There are different kinds of software, and being able to write a package manager does not mean one can write an algorithm-heavy application. If a genius circuit design engineer from Intel would apply to Google's SWE position, they would be rejected as well, despite Google running on Intel's servers.
hinkley 8y ago
I work on a project that suffers from NIH and the lava flow antipattern. We have three implementations of merge() and all have different semantics. I don’t even try to memorize the APIs any more. I kind of keep an inventory of what’s available and just google or read the source to figure out what it’s called this week and what it does with undefined or optional arguments. We all know I’ll be using a new API in a year or two anyway...
Topgamer7 8y ago
I think people follow process a little to much in interviews. You should be testing the knowledge that you expect them to have, and testing that they can problems solve/adapt and work out a problem. I'd prefer to ask a person a question how to conceptually solve a problem, instead of trying to have them verbatim write out a linked list implementation from memory.
- brianpgordon 8y ago
  What do you mean from memory? If you can't remember how to implement a linked list, you don't know anything about data structures. It's unbelievable to me that someone could blank out and forget how to implement a linked list.
BeetleB 8y ago
>because he couldn't remember some useless piece of easily-googleable (ha) CS trivia on the spot. This is a myth. There's no good reason to believe he didn't get the job for that reason, other than his claim.
crimsonalucard 8y ago
https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejecting-Max-Howell-the-author-of-Homebrew-for-not-being-able-to-invert-a-binary-tree https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin... Please read the above. It contains an updated opinion from the creator of homebrew and is more relevant. It also contains responses from people who worked at google and were or are part of the hiring process.
- DenisM 8y ago
  Some of the Google employee replies are so bad, they circle around and come out good.
lokidokiro 8y ago
Google interviews are four hours long and they don't tell you how did after the interview. There's no way he can possibly know the reason he got rejected.
- tsumnia 8y ago
  Not necessarily true, I interviewed for Google once and from the two interview sessions, I have a good idea which one I bombed.
  - lokidokiro 8y ago
    The statement seems to imply that he would have gotten offered if he had been able to answer whatever this question was. There's no way he can know that. It seems more likely that he was shaky in his other interviews which all added up to him being rejected. If you're an interviewer and the interviewee is doing poorly, do you tell them they're failing? I certainly don't.
giarc 8y ago
Similar to this one. Sebastian McKenzie @sebmck Facebook Got rejected from a junior position at Atlassian for not knowing enough about JavaScript. Shortly after they now use the JavaScript compiler that I wrote across most of their JavaScript stack. Or Ian Devlin @iandevlin Trivago Rejected by the Google HTML5 Developer Expert programme for not knowing enough about HTML5. Apparently being one of the HTML5 Doctors, writing many articles on the subject and having a book on HTML5 Multimedia being published wasn't enough for them.
- sjg007 8y ago
  This shows how broken interviews are. I mean the biggest example is the What’s app founder who was rejected from Facebook and then sold his company to Facebook for a lot of billions.
- robocat 8y ago
  In Ian's case, maybe they found people with better HTML5 qualifications, or more likely they found people with the other x relevant skills needed for the programme.
  - giarc 8y ago
    I agree, this is definitely one of those times where we only have one side of the story. I think they are humorous but likely not a real commentary on hiring practices.
    - rococode 8y ago
      Right, it's easy to make fun of the interviewers, but it seems incredibly unlikely to me that they would miss something like that on a resume (or that the interviewee would fail to bring it up). It's more likely that they just wanted someone who met some very specific requirements, and the people who were rejected simply failed to meet those requirements, even though they were possibly overqualified in other aspects.
- democracy 8y ago
  For as long as I can remember Atlassian did everything they could to justify bringing cheaper people on working visas: thus 5-6 interviews, long pauses between each stage, lower-than-market salaries, public complaining by CEO for not having enough local resources for hiring - basically anything to make a local (Australian) programmer not to get a job.
Aunche 8y ago
Google tells you what to prepare for during an interview. I'm sure that if Max Howell spent a few hours reviewing data structures and algorithms like the rest of us, he would have passed with flying colors. His hostility towards his interview experience only reinforces that he likely wouldn't be a good fit in a large corporation like Google.
- tlackemann 8y ago
  And that's exactly why I would never apply for Google. Despite me having years of leading product teams and enterprise applications, the fact that I need to "study" for an interview is asinine.
  - dwild 8y ago
    > Despite me having years of leading product teams and enterprise applications, the fact that I need to "study" for an interview is asinine. You no longer study? You stopped any form of education? I have an hard time believing that's actually true, but if it is, I guess you aren't a good fit for them either. I read on new technologies constantly, I learn new languages constantly, I haven't gone to any formation yet (I just finished my software engineering degree) but I will certainly. Continous learning is nothing new. They need someone able to adapt, which does means learn, and clearly in the case of Google, pretty quickly too. Studying to pass their interview process is no different than studying to apply X new principle.
    - stagger87 8y ago
      "You no longer study?" This is a straw man. It is clear from the context of the discussion that 'studying' refers to the study of algorithms/data structures/etc that is typically questioned in CS job interviews.
    - tlackemann 8y ago
      > You no longer study? You stopped any form of education? Oh please. I've always taught myself new concepts and am constantly reading books and learning new languages. Hell, I went from working in "big corporate" to starting my own business building video games, something I knew virtually nothing about because I was driven to do so. I learned Rust on my own, I taught myself 3D programming, I've taken classes on public speaking. These are things I didn't need to prove to anyone, I just felt motivated to because I felt it would benefit my career. > Studying to pass their interview process is no different than studying to apply X new principle. The fact there are websites dedicated to helping you study for Google's interview process means something is broken. You should be able to gauge a person's motivation and willingness to learn beyond knowing seven different algorithms from memory. If they want someone who can adapt, look to experience and have questions ready to prove that experience. I shouldn't need to recall information like flash cards. Applying to Google feels like studying for the SATs all over again. Two cents. Google isn't for me despite feeling I could make a big impact there knowing my motivation levels and work ethic. I highly discourage anyone from adapting a similar interview process.
yongjik 8y ago
> he couldn't remember some useless piece of easily-googleable (ha) CS trivia on the spot. Or that's what he claimed. > Even though they all run it internally. That's what he claimed as well. But never heard of Homebrew while I was at Google, though I had a Macbook for 5+ years. (Well I can't definitely say my Macbook never ran Homebrew - after all, when you are in Google, all such things are handled by dedicated teams. But I can definitely tell that this "scandal" was the first time I heard about Homebrew.) Not trying to take him down - I'm now in a different company and use Homebrew quite happily, but it's simply not true that it was widely used inside Google.
- hartator 8y ago
  Hum, how can you do development work with HomeBrew? You install packages one-by-one?
  - yongjik 8y ago
    Google is a Linux shop. Most Googlers don't do any development on Mac (unless they're specifically working on something that runs on Mac, like maybe Chrome). Each one has a linux desktop (or at least that was the case while I was there), and all the heavy work is done "in the cloud" anyway.
  - tom_ 8y ago
    MacPorts.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    There are other package managers on macOS, such as MacPorts and Fink. And you don't need to use a package manager to install software.
  - usepgp 8y ago
    just asked the 6 or so coworkers here right now who have macs. not a single one has homebrew installed.
  - rifung 8y ago
    Besides iOS developers and maybe open source developers, people don't and aren't allowed to have code on their laptops at Google. You have to ssh into your desktop so presumably there's no reason to have Homebrew unless you're doing personal stuff.
akhilcacharya 8y ago
Inverting a BST isn’t trivia, it’s a pretty straightforward problem. For the record it’s a warmup problem!
- part200 8y ago
  Did you miss a /s?
tom_ 8y ago
I failed to find a link to the tweet - best I could find just now is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12551652 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12551652, so maybe he deleted it? - but at some point he tweeted that he'd left Apple because working at a big company wasn't really his bag. So maybe the Google people didn't make the wrong decision after all.
mcguire 8y ago
"Why am I so hardnosed about this? It’s because it is much, much better to reject a good candidate than to accept a bad candidate." -- Joel https://www.forbes.com/sites/falonfatemi/2016/09/28/the-true-cost-of-a-bad-hire-its-more-than-you-think/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/falonfatemi/2016/09/28/the-true...
aylmao 8y ago
The most mind-boggling thing to me is that Google interns get re-interviewed before getting a return offer. You don't go through the whole process. I can't remember the exact numbers, but iirc the logic is that offer decisions are made on 5 pieces of feedback. If you interview at Google you get a total of 5 interviews. If you're an intern, your intern manager and two peers write feedback, so they need 2 other people to interview you and give a thumbs up. If you think about it, this is kinda nuts. They're hiring someone to do a job. They have them do that job for 3 months. Yet, rather than fully basing their decision on wether that person is good at the job they will actually be doing, they instead opt for also putting you through coding interview questions. I haven't heard of another company that does this. I know others also want several opinions, so they just assign more peer/manager reviewers. The sad part is I know interns who suspect this might well be why they didn't get a return offer-- interviewing is nerve-wrecking for some people, and it can be hard to get up to speed especially because towards the end of the summer recruiting season and early school to-dos start to pile up on top of finishing your intern project.

by sho 8y ago

aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago

>Even though they all run it internally. I bet many Google projects also use `leftpad` internally.

pmden 8y ago

"possibly the most important piece of software on OSX" I'm earnestly trying to avoid downplaying his work, but it's only a package manager. Unless he was interviewing to be Google's next head of package management on OSX, I'm not sure why you think assessing him on something other than his useful side project is bad form. I'm also not certain how an answer being 'easily-googleable' makes it arbitrary or pointless. Someone had to write that answer on Stack Overflow, and the chances are you'd rather hire that guy.

electrograv 8y ago
> I'm earnestly trying to avoid downplaying his work, but it's only a package manager. I'm earnestly trying to avoid downplaying your comment, but you sound like you have no clue how much engineering effort and talent is actually required to build and maintain a reliable, functional, production-grade package manager that a huge number of people use. Being able to completely implement and support a sophisticated software product end-to-end is a FAR better indicator of engineering talent than isolated algorithm puzzles on a whiteboard. Whiteboard problems are used in interviews simply because individually executed complete projects are so rare (at all, let alone publicly visible). In fact, whiteboard interviews have all but been proven to be among the least useful at distinguishing good vs bad candidates. The only reason it works is because everyone knows it's a game, studies the game, and gets tested at the same game. It's essentially a disguised IQ test that you have to study for. The problem is, if you don't study for it specifically, you're at a huge disadvantage. This leads to famous engineers (clearly talented) getting rejected because they don't practice jumping through the particular hoops the company makes everyone jump through. It seems there are more than several cases where Google needs a high profile engineer more than that engineer needs Google, and as a result the engineer doesn't study the hoop-jumping Google wants. Google rejects them out of bureaucratic process, and loses out on a good hire. On the opposite side: I'm not a famous engineer, so I suck it up and practice whiteboard algorithm problems like most everyone else -- and as a result, I've never had a problem passing coding interviews. But just because most everyone jumps through hoops to play the game, doesn't mean everyone should have to.
- godot 8y ago
  To add to your points, the problem is not just missing good engineers because they don't study and play the game, but also hiring bad engineers because they study and play the game. I personally know of people who habitually study FAANG interview questions, and make it their career to jump ship every few years for salary boosts. I've worked with some of these people; while they are nice and friendly folks and I consider some of them good friends of mine, they are much less-good engineers compared to many others I know, who stay in smaller startups and want to get things done and don't want to play the interview game.
  - diracpam 8y ago
    I'm one such 'engineer' who is good at whiteboarding algorithms. I can do well on 'system design' questions but dont feel confident at all about really designing such a system from ground up. I, for one, am glad that I can find gainful employment by memorizing 200 pages.
    - jimjansen1 8y ago
      I applaud your honesty. There is a bizarre religion on HN where people think that doing well at Whiteboard/algo interviews makes you a good engineer or is somehow crucial to recruiting good talent.
    - vanderZwan 8y ago
      I'm happy for you, but I hope you're also that honest with yourself and your employers about your limits when they want you to built something that you know is over your head
- saagarjha 8y ago
  > I'm earnestly trying to avoid downplaying your comment, but you sound like you have no clue how much engineering effort and talent is actually required to build and maintain a reliable, functional, production-grade package manager that a huge number of people use. It's also entirely possible that Google saw Homebrew as neither reliable, functional, or production-grade enough for their taste. While Homebrew is somewhat decent today (though, it's still broken in some ways that I will not go into here and I'm under the impression that it's being worked on), but it wasn't always particularly reliable or stable. The only real benefit it had (and arguably still has) is that it has massive traction.
linkregister 8y ago
> I'm earnestly trying to avoid downplaying his work, but it's only a package manager. I don't really know what to tell you, except I feel like you may be new to software engineering or have forgotten much of what goes into it. The vast majority of engineers at Google will never lead a software project with the utility and breadth of use as the most popular package manager for mac OS for almost a decade. Most engineers at Google will contribute to a small portion of software that will be run by a large fraction of the planet's computers, but owning the architecture, project management, testing, community support, and coding? No. A package manager that works as well as brew (though it's not without its faults!) is non-trivial to say the least. We suffered through fink, and things got better with macports. But brew clearly works better. It's reasonable for a company to reject a new graduate applicant based on their freezing during an interview, for an algorithm that is part of freshman year courses in Computer Science. It's also reasonable for us to comment on the absurdity of a company making the same determination for a senior software engineer at a top software company, the vast majority of whom do not touch binary trees for an entire career! If a Google engineer were to reimplement a binary tree or quicksort in a backend service, that code would fail code review with the comment: "use the library." > Someone had to write that answer on Stack Overflow, and the chances are you'd rather hire that guy. The popularity of his tweet indicates that no, chances are that engineers interviewing Max Howell would absolutely choose him over a binary-tree-implementer. Evidence indicates your viewpoint is in the minority.
- sethammons 8y ago
  I think you answered it yourself. His skill set (running, managing, community, etc) are not what Google needs (as they see it). They need someone who "will contribute to a small portion of software that will be run by a large fraction of the planet's computers, but owning the architecture, project management, testing, community support, and coding? No."
  - vonmoltke 8y ago
    Your "etc" includes writing the damn thing in the first place, which indicates he is more than qualified for "will contribute to a small portion of software that will be run by a large fraction of the planet's computers". Furthermore, for L5 and up Google is most certainly looking for systems design and engineering leadership skills.
gamesbrainiac 8y ago
Package manages often determine the success of an entire ecosystem. To give you an idea of how hard this is, Go still has not been able to come up with proper package management. Some of the best engineers in the world built that language.
- dwild 8y ago
  > Package manages often determine the success of an entire ecosystem. Nobody said it wasn't great, just that whether he is good to make a package manager, doesn't determine if he is a good fit for anything else. If that hiring position was to build a system to manage packages, sure, he is probably the best hire for that, but theses skills are specific to exactly this task. A great interviewer though would have kept his contact information though and would have tried to put him somewhere else though. He may have not been a good fit for what they were looking for, but they can clearly use his skill in some ways some where else.
  - swat535 8y ago
    You're absolutely right. the best metric is to see how quickly he can reverse a binary tree. now that is grounds for instant dismissal !
- saagarjha 8y ago
  macOS had multiple package managers prior to Homebrew.
  - mratzloff 8y ago
    And they sucked.
sergiotapia 8y ago
You're acting like all the engineers at Google work on search algorithms and incredibly research-focused work. I bet you they still have the footsoldiers out there building consumer facing products. You're telling me the guy who built Homebrew can't sprinkle some awesome dev ux to some of Google's tools?

theamk 8y ago

There are different kinds of software, and being able to write a package manager does not mean one can write an algorithm-heavy application. If a genius circuit design engineer from Intel would apply to Google's SWE position, they would be rejected as well, despite Google running on Intel's servers.

hinkley 8y ago

I work on a project that suffers from NIH and the lava flow antipattern. We have three implementations of merge() and all have different semantics. I don’t even try to memorize the APIs any more. I kind of keep an inventory of what’s available and just google or read the source to figure out what it’s called this week and what it does with undefined or optional arguments. We all know I’ll be using a new API in a year or two anyway...

Topgamer7 8y ago

I think people follow process a little to much in interviews. You should be testing the knowledge that you expect them to have, and testing that they can problems solve/adapt and work out a problem. I'd prefer to ask a person a question how to conceptually solve a problem, instead of trying to have them verbatim write out a linked list implementation from memory.

brianpgordon 8y ago
What do you mean from memory? If you can't remember how to implement a linked list, you don't know anything about data structures. It's unbelievable to me that someone could blank out and forget how to implement a linked list.

BeetleB 8y ago

>because he couldn't remember some useless piece of easily-googleable (ha) CS trivia on the spot. This is a myth. There's no good reason to believe he didn't get the job for that reason, other than his claim.

crimsonalucard 8y ago

https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejecting-Max-Howell-the-author-of-Homebrew-for-not-being-able-to-invert-a-binary-tree https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin... Please read the above. It contains an updated opinion from the creator of homebrew and is more relevant. It also contains responses from people who worked at google and were or are part of the hiring process.

DenisM 8y ago
Some of the Google employee replies are so bad, they circle around and come out good.

lokidokiro 8y ago

Google interviews are four hours long and they don't tell you how did after the interview. There's no way he can possibly know the reason he got rejected.

tsumnia 8y ago
Not necessarily true, I interviewed for Google once and from the two interview sessions, I have a good idea which one I bombed.
- lokidokiro 8y ago
  The statement seems to imply that he would have gotten offered if he had been able to answer whatever this question was. There's no way he can know that. It seems more likely that he was shaky in his other interviews which all added up to him being rejected. If you're an interviewer and the interviewee is doing poorly, do you tell them they're failing? I certainly don't.

giarc 8y ago

Similar to this one. Sebastian McKenzie @sebmck Facebook Got rejected from a junior position at Atlassian for not knowing enough about JavaScript. Shortly after they now use the JavaScript compiler that I wrote across most of their JavaScript stack. Or Ian Devlin @iandevlin Trivago Rejected by the Google HTML5 Developer Expert programme for not knowing enough about HTML5. Apparently being one of the HTML5 Doctors, writing many articles on the subject and having a book on HTML5 Multimedia being published wasn't enough for them.

sjg007 8y ago
This shows how broken interviews are. I mean the biggest example is the What’s app founder who was rejected from Facebook and then sold his company to Facebook for a lot of billions.
robocat 8y ago
In Ian's case, maybe they found people with better HTML5 qualifications, or more likely they found people with the other x relevant skills needed for the programme.
- giarc 8y ago
  I agree, this is definitely one of those times where we only have one side of the story. I think they are humorous but likely not a real commentary on hiring practices.
  - rococode 8y ago
    Right, it's easy to make fun of the interviewers, but it seems incredibly unlikely to me that they would miss something like that on a resume (or that the interviewee would fail to bring it up). It's more likely that they just wanted someone who met some very specific requirements, and the people who were rejected simply failed to meet those requirements, even though they were possibly overqualified in other aspects.
democracy 8y ago
For as long as I can remember Atlassian did everything they could to justify bringing cheaper people on working visas: thus 5-6 interviews, long pauses between each stage, lower-than-market salaries, public complaining by CEO for not having enough local resources for hiring - basically anything to make a local (Australian) programmer not to get a job.

Aunche 8y ago

Google tells you what to prepare for during an interview. I'm sure that if Max Howell spent a few hours reviewing data structures and algorithms like the rest of us, he would have passed with flying colors. His hostility towards his interview experience only reinforces that he likely wouldn't be a good fit in a large corporation like Google.

tlackemann 8y ago
And that's exactly why I would never apply for Google. Despite me having years of leading product teams and enterprise applications, the fact that I need to "study" for an interview is asinine.
- dwild 8y ago
  > Despite me having years of leading product teams and enterprise applications, the fact that I need to "study" for an interview is asinine. You no longer study? You stopped any form of education? I have an hard time believing that's actually true, but if it is, I guess you aren't a good fit for them either. I read on new technologies constantly, I learn new languages constantly, I haven't gone to any formation yet (I just finished my software engineering degree) but I will certainly. Continous learning is nothing new. They need someone able to adapt, which does means learn, and clearly in the case of Google, pretty quickly too. Studying to pass their interview process is no different than studying to apply X new principle.
  - stagger87 8y ago
    "You no longer study?" This is a straw man. It is clear from the context of the discussion that 'studying' refers to the study of algorithms/data structures/etc that is typically questioned in CS job interviews.
  - tlackemann 8y ago
    > You no longer study? You stopped any form of education? Oh please. I've always taught myself new concepts and am constantly reading books and learning new languages. Hell, I went from working in "big corporate" to starting my own business building video games, something I knew virtually nothing about because I was driven to do so. I learned Rust on my own, I taught myself 3D programming, I've taken classes on public speaking. These are things I didn't need to prove to anyone, I just felt motivated to because I felt it would benefit my career. > Studying to pass their interview process is no different than studying to apply X new principle. The fact there are websites dedicated to helping you study for Google's interview process means something is broken. You should be able to gauge a person's motivation and willingness to learn beyond knowing seven different algorithms from memory. If they want someone who can adapt, look to experience and have questions ready to prove that experience. I shouldn't need to recall information like flash cards. Applying to Google feels like studying for the SATs all over again. Two cents. Google isn't for me despite feeling I could make a big impact there knowing my motivation levels and work ethic. I highly discourage anyone from adapting a similar interview process.

yongjik 8y ago

> he couldn't remember some useless piece of easily-googleable (ha) CS trivia on the spot. Or that's what he claimed. > Even though they all run it internally. That's what he claimed as well. But never heard of Homebrew while I was at Google, though I had a Macbook for 5+ years. (Well I can't definitely say my Macbook never ran Homebrew - after all, when you are in Google, all such things are handled by dedicated teams. But I can definitely tell that this "scandal" was the first time I heard about Homebrew.) Not trying to take him down - I'm now in a different company and use Homebrew quite happily, but it's simply not true that it was widely used inside Google.

hartator 8y ago
Hum, how can you do development work with HomeBrew? You install packages one-by-one?
- yongjik 8y ago
  Google is a Linux shop. Most Googlers don't do any development on Mac (unless they're specifically working on something that runs on Mac, like maybe Chrome). Each one has a linux desktop (or at least that was the case while I was there), and all the heavy work is done "in the cloud" anyway.
- tom_ 8y ago
  MacPorts.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  There are other package managers on macOS, such as MacPorts and Fink. And you don't need to use a package manager to install software.
- usepgp 8y ago
  just asked the 6 or so coworkers here right now who have macs. not a single one has homebrew installed.
- rifung 8y ago
  Besides iOS developers and maybe open source developers, people don't and aren't allowed to have code on their laptops at Google. You have to ssh into your desktop so presumably there's no reason to have Homebrew unless you're doing personal stuff.

akhilcacharya 8y ago

Inverting a BST isn’t trivia, it’s a pretty straightforward problem. For the record it’s a warmup problem!

part200 8y ago
Did you miss a /s?

tom_ 8y ago

I failed to find a link to the tweet - best I could find just now is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12551652 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12551652, so maybe he deleted it? - but at some point he tweeted that he'd left Apple because working at a big company wasn't really his bag. So maybe the Google people didn't make the wrong decision after all.

mcguire 8y ago

"Why am I so hardnosed about this? It’s because it is much, much better to reject a good candidate than to accept a bad candidate." -- Joel https://www.forbes.com/sites/falonfatemi/2016/09/28/the-true-cost-of-a-bad-hire-its-more-than-you-think/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/falonfatemi/2016/09/28/the-true...

aylmao 8y ago

The most mind-boggling thing to me is that Google interns get re-interviewed before getting a return offer. You don't go through the whole process. I can't remember the exact numbers, but iirc the logic is that offer decisions are made on 5 pieces of feedback. If you interview at Google you get a total of 5 interviews. If you're an intern, your intern manager and two peers write feedback, so they need 2 other people to interview you and give a thumbs up. If you think about it, this is kinda nuts. They're hiring someone to do a job. They have them do that job for 3 months. Yet, rather than fully basing their decision on wether that person is good at the job they will actually be doing, they instead opt for also putting you through coding interview questions. I haven't heard of another company that does this. I know others also want several opinions, so they just assign more peer/manager reviewers. The sad part is I know interns who suspect this might well be why they didn't get a return offer-- interviewing is nerve-wrecking for some people, and it can be hard to get up to speed especially because towards the end of the summer recruiting season and early school to-dos start to pile up on top of finishing your intern project.