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This article is hurting its credibility right from the get-go by un-critically reproducing yet again this tired saw from Max Howell: > Google: 90% of our engin

This article is hurting its credibility right from the get-go by un-critically reproducing yet again this tired saw from Max Howell: > 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. First, it's not remotely true that 90% of Google engineers use Homebrew, seeing as how almost all development is done on Linux (Max Howell is unjustifiably full of himself here). And secondly, he doesn't know why he wasn't hired, but it may well be because of the entitled attitude on display here rather than any coding shortcomings. No one wants to work with pompous rockstars. They may be fine for developing one-person projects out in the wild but they don't work well on team projects at large companies. If you go into an interview with the attitude that the problems you're being asked to solve are beneath you and that you just flat-out deserve the job without having to prove yourself, your success rate is gonna be poor. To a big corporation, almost no one is as big of a deal as they might think they are, unless they hold a Turing Award or similar.

dgb23 6y ago
I get what you mean, but I think this can be looked at in a more neutral way, especially if we distance ourselves from the exact Homebrew example. The expectation of a large engineering company is to hire someone who fits well into their way of doing things. Typically they want smart, humble team-players with predictable skills (AKA solid educational background and possibly industry experience). However an open source tool author has completely different self-imposed requirements and capabilities. If successful, they have proven that they can ship reliable software, basically on their own, which people want to use. Which is great, exceptional even. But typically not in terms of the metrics of a large engineering company, except they actually do use the tool/library, deem it important and the role of the programmer would involve developing/supporting it. This also poses the question of: "Why would open source author want to get hired by big company in the first place?" Wouldn't this mismatch of expectations and skill-sets be a hindrance/waste? Aren't there much better places for this exceptional open source author? Startups, other open source projects, self-employment/freelancing, SMEs etc.
dekhn 6y ago
Most Googler SWEs have Mac laptops, not linux or windows laptops. But only a fraction of them use brew to install additional software. I'd love to interview the creator of homebrew. There are so many dependency and reliabiltiy questions that it's clear brew doesn't handle well (same criticism of CPAN, and pip to some degree) in terms of performance or correctness that you could just talk for an hour about graph problems... who knows, something like... inverting a binary tree?
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  How does Google develop software? Someone told me they did all their development in the cloud and you aren't allowed to check out software locally? Does that mean they just use their macs as thin terminals? But what's running in the cloud for development then? Linux X desktops, or do you edit in a browser, or do you develop entirely in a console over SSH? Nobody seems to talk about the developer experience at Google that I've seen, despite how much they talk about how they do operations and site reliability.
  - dekhn 6y ago
    It depends. Many googlers work on the centralized google3 source tree where the source lives in the cloud and your workstation is mostly a frontend for editing a FUSE view (citc): https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stores-billions-of-lines-of-code-in-a-single-repository/fulltext https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stor... among other documentation gives some details on the process. Typically that work will be done on a workstation at your desktop. But if you want to work remotely, and you can't access citc from your laptop. So, you'd ssh into your workstation, or use Chrome Remote Desktop (personally, I ssh from a ChromeOS laptop to a glinux workstation with tmux). Others use CRD for a full remote desktop. At that point the dev experience is mostly what like other people experience, except that the source and build and test environments are in the cloud, rather than on your local machine. That just describes one common case- devs and researchers writing stuff that runs on Google's internal resource management system, borg. There are many other teams, who have their own standards and approaches, which don't use the technology I described abvove. I'm sure there are plenty of devs at Google who actually build directly on their laptop, and commit code to open source repos without ever touching citc, or google3. For me at least, the dev experience at Google feels like every other dev job I've had: ssh to a LINUX machine, write code, compile it, run tests, send it for review, submit. A lot of people who are C++ server developers and python client developers could drop into the Google environment and quickly be productive. A lot of this is documented in external talks but it takes a ton of work to assemble all of it.
hajimemash 6y ago
Thought experiment: If one were to make a very simple yet popular program, for what reason would that entitle them to a job somewhere? I'm having trouble thinking of one.
chrisseaton 6y ago
I think people forget how incredibly high the Google hiring bar is. Tons of people have written extremely successful software, but I think you really need to be at the very top of your field to even be considering going to Google. You can be absolutely excellent... and still not be good enough for Google, and it's fine to admit that.
- dabraham1248 6y ago
  I've known too many people who work at Google to agree with this. They've hired some people who were just plain incompetent, some who were great, but mostly in the middle, much like every other company. TBF, they do seem to have more than their share of great, but, not by a lot...
redisman 6y ago
I do use brew on my Linux machine too - mainly because it's easier to duplicate my Mac workspace that way.

dgb23 6y ago

I get what you mean, but I think this can be looked at in a more neutral way, especially if we distance ourselves from the exact Homebrew example. The expectation of a large engineering company is to hire someone who fits well into their way of doing things. Typically they want smart, humble team-players with predictable skills (AKA solid educational background and possibly industry experience). However an open source tool author has completely different self-imposed requirements and capabilities. If successful, they have proven that they can ship reliable software, basically on their own, which people want to use. Which is great, exceptional even. But typically not in terms of the metrics of a large engineering company, except they actually do use the tool/library, deem it important and the role of the programmer would involve developing/supporting it. This also poses the question of: "Why would open source author want to get hired by big company in the first place?" Wouldn't this mismatch of expectations and skill-sets be a hindrance/waste? Aren't there much better places for this exceptional open source author? Startups, other open source projects, self-employment/freelancing, SMEs etc.

dekhn 6y ago

Most Googler SWEs have Mac laptops, not linux or windows laptops. But only a fraction of them use brew to install additional software. I'd love to interview the creator of homebrew. There are so many dependency and reliabiltiy questions that it's clear brew doesn't handle well (same criticism of CPAN, and pip to some degree) in terms of performance or correctness that you could just talk for an hour about graph problems... who knows, something like... inverting a binary tree?

chrisseaton 6y ago
How does Google develop software? Someone told me they did all their development in the cloud and you aren't allowed to check out software locally? Does that mean they just use their macs as thin terminals? But what's running in the cloud for development then? Linux X desktops, or do you edit in a browser, or do you develop entirely in a console over SSH? Nobody seems to talk about the developer experience at Google that I've seen, despite how much they talk about how they do operations and site reliability.
- dekhn 6y ago
  It depends. Many googlers work on the centralized google3 source tree where the source lives in the cloud and your workstation is mostly a frontend for editing a FUSE view (citc): https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stores-billions-of-lines-of-code-in-a-single-repository/fulltext https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stor... among other documentation gives some details on the process. Typically that work will be done on a workstation at your desktop. But if you want to work remotely, and you can't access citc from your laptop. So, you'd ssh into your workstation, or use Chrome Remote Desktop (personally, I ssh from a ChromeOS laptop to a glinux workstation with tmux). Others use CRD for a full remote desktop. At that point the dev experience is mostly what like other people experience, except that the source and build and test environments are in the cloud, rather than on your local machine. That just describes one common case- devs and researchers writing stuff that runs on Google's internal resource management system, borg. There are many other teams, who have their own standards and approaches, which don't use the technology I described abvove. I'm sure there are plenty of devs at Google who actually build directly on their laptop, and commit code to open source repos without ever touching citc, or google3. For me at least, the dev experience at Google feels like every other dev job I've had: ssh to a LINUX machine, write code, compile it, run tests, send it for review, submit. A lot of people who are C++ server developers and python client developers could drop into the Google environment and quickly be productive. A lot of this is documented in external talks but it takes a ton of work to assemble all of it.

hajimemash 6y ago

Thought experiment: If one were to make a very simple yet popular program, for what reason would that entitle them to a job somewhere? I'm having trouble thinking of one.

chrisseaton 6y ago

I think people forget how incredibly high the Google hiring bar is. Tons of people have written extremely successful software, but I think you really need to be at the very top of your field to even be considering going to Google. You can be absolutely excellent... and still not be good enough for Google, and it's fine to admit that.

dabraham1248 6y ago
I've known too many people who work at Google to agree with this. They've hired some people who were just plain incompetent, some who were great, but mostly in the middle, much like every other company. TBF, they do seem to have more than their share of great, but, not by a lot...

redisman 6y ago

I do use brew on my Linux machine too - mainly because it's easier to duplicate my Mac workspace that way.