Comment by joshstrange
11 years ago
To all of those saying ranting on twitter is the wrong move I couldn't disagree more. Twitter is often the ONLY tool that the average person can use to communicate and/or call out large companies on their actions. This is BS and should be made known. Homebrew is an amazing tool and I'd be falling over myself getting the offer papers in this guy's hands if he came to me looking for a job. The fact that google turned him away only further cements my opinion that google would be a terrible place to work.
My main complaint with the tweet is that it's almost certainly speculation.
1) Most companies (for legal reasons) don't tell candidates why they weren't offered a job. Maybe it was because of the binary tree question, but maybe it was for some other reason.
2) Homebrew is a Mac-only product, so the likelihood that 90% of Googlers use homebrew is very low. Moreover, Google does not track the software its employees download onto their laptops, so there's no way they would even know the percentage.
> 1) Most companies (for legal reasons) don't tell candidates why they weren't offered a job. Maybe it was because of the binary tree question, but maybe it was for some other reason.
So when I was declined at Google I knew people who worked for Google. One looked up my profile in whatever system they used and the other simply asked the interviewer why. OP may have done the same but as you say it's unclear either way but knowing is still possible.
> 2) Homebrew is a Mac-only product, so the likelihood that 90% of Googlers use homebrew is very low. Moreover, Google does not track the software its employees download onto their laptops, so there's no way they would even know the percentage.
Most of the people I know at Google use Macs so I don't see why not. I don't know what the majority of them use but a good chunk at least do.
As far as tracking he could simply be tracking it himself and comparing his results of known Google IPs to employee counts. Not as accurate but might give a rough estimation. He may have further analytics based on data collected (if collected) by each machine.
The tweet starts out: "Google: 90% of our engineers...", which implies that this is information Google told him.
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To your second point, there is an official Linux fork called Linuxbrew. http://brew.sh/linuxbrew/
Granted Linuxbrew isn't nearly as prevalent as Homebrew, but Macs are prevalent at Google.
Really? In the UK companies are legally obliged to reveal why a candidate did not get a job, if asked... in my understanding.
I'm sceptical; I've heard this before but never managed to track down a source; I also don't know if you need some specific wording for this or if it's so vague as to be useful. Case in point: when I've failed my google interviews in London, I asked for the feedback, and got a reply saying something like "Sorry, we don't do detailed feedback. We weren't happy with your performance on the interviews". Which, duh, I got that from the being rejected part :P
Huh? I've been rejected by an UK company with just "you're obviously a very experienced programmer, but "we are not able to take your application any further at this time".
I did get a code review out of it though, and it did point out a few real issues, so I'm ok with it.
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They can offer non-answers :) ... in Germany they got very good writing "recommendation" letters that have some hidden hints:
http://www.goldbeck.com/hrblog/employee-references-germany-v...
In my experience it goes exactly like this just about everywhere:
job: here is your macbook pro, welcome! you: <install homebrew>
I don't have it installed on my Macs - what am I missing? I write C++ daily on them.
EDIT: Seriously, what am I missing that I'd need as a developer? My dayjob is on a Mac Pro writing desktop software and my hobby at night is on a MacBook Pro doing the same; it's on neither machine.
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We don't have all the details. You might not hire the best computer programmer in the world if he was also a psychopath. Heck, you might skip on him even if he wasn't a good culture fit. I'm not saying this person is / was any of those things, but there's more to hiring than just talent.
There's also the committee factor. Google doesn't hire/no-hire based just on one person's opinion. If half your committee says, "90% of our engineers use his thing!" and the other half says, "But he can't code on a whiteboard!" then the committee is already kinda likely to take a pass due to lack of consensus. If there's any doubts at all on culture fit, which Google absolutely does care a great deal about, even more so. That said, when I was there, I interviewed someone who was essentially going to be my partner on something and everyone else (who weren't going to be working with this person) ranked the person poorly and I was the sole voice of (positive) dissent. I wasn't on the committee, so I don't know what their logic was, but the person was hired. And they were great. So it's not always even a majority opinion thing with the interviewers. In a nutshell, not only are we dealing with incomplete information here, we're dealing with VERY incomplete information.
Yeah, the twitter rant was a little unnerving. Might not have anything to do with inverting the binary tree.
He was there and that's what he felt it was the cause of his rejection. We haven't had the opportunity to witness his hiring process.
That's not what happened at all. Google has an interview process that is designed to weed out false positives(incompetent people getting hired). Because this guy didn't have enough algorithmic knowledge he failed their filter. To work at the borg you must learn and play by the borgs rules!
Ranting on twitter is fucking awful. All it gives is nuance-free soundbites, and there are no 'lines to read between' due to it's brevity. Stuff gets taken the wrong way or out of context all the time.
One of the reasons why it's so powerful is because it gives lazy journalists a stream of easy reaction quotes. When else in the history of journalism has there ever been a private company that was so heavily promoted, regardless of the media source? And even then, the react quotes are poor quality, single-sentence shit.
This rant on twitter is absolutely meaningless unless you have a heap of context to go with it. And because twitter is popular, it's dumbing down public discourse along with it.
/rant, that I couldn't have fit in 140 characters.
maybe Homebrew is amazing, but Google can hire the best people in the world. that day they might've interviewed 10 people better than him who just didn't make a popular tool
"that day they might've interviewed 10 people better than him who just didn't make a popular tool"
Are you judging this on their ability to invert a binary tree? People here are ranting about having a problem with interview practices not representing whether or not you are good at your job. That's presumably (IMO) why the tweet was posted.
the tweet is made to trigger that discussion. but you can rephrase the tweet to something like: even though I made a popular tool, I didn't get a job at Google because I'm not good at other things they need. Google probably has a lot of factors counted into the final decision, including algorithm skills, other software engineering skills, human skills, contributions to open source projects. It's never 1 reason why you get rejected, it's the total score.
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> maybe Homebrew is amazing, but Google can hire the best people in the world.
Then why don't they? I wouldn't consider "the best people in the world" those that can pass an advanced CS class.
so for you "best in the world" is not someone good at CS. similarly, for Google it appears best in the world is not someone that made a popular tool.
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Well how do you define "better"?
Esteemed schools of music probably produce dozens of guitarists "better" (in any way you would measure it academically) than Jimmy Page or Jimi Hendrix per year who go on to a life of producing nothing of lasting worth.
I'll take the guy/girl who has actually proved they can produce something useful every time over someone who is "better" but hasn't.
Well then I guess it's because Page/Hendrix were much more than expert guitarists. They were also good at composition, lyrics, showmanship, marketing, business. Those academic guitarists will make contributions to the guitar field but seems that you wouldn't value that alone and it's OK. You are free to have your opinion about whom to hire just as Google is. For the sake of the argument, you could imagine 100 reasons why Google wouldn't hire Jimi Hendrix. Even though he produced something very popular he lacks many things that Google wants: he's not respectful of other people so he's going to cause other people problems, he's doing hard drugs so he's unpredictable, good with guitar but not other instruments, and so on.
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