Comment by dozzie
8 years 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.
"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.
Millions 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!).
Authors 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.
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