Comment by smackfu

Last I knew, Google corporate Macs don't include Homebrew. (I left Google a year ago, things could've changed since then.) I'd be very surprised if it was allowed, I have an open-source project that's available via brew and I've had people at other companies tell me that anything brew-only is a complete non-starter at their company because Homebrew isn't allowed for security reasons, and Google cares a good deal about security.

I assume that the dev was referring to Googlers' personal laptops with the "90% of your devs use Homebrew". It's not unreasonable to estimate that 90% of Google engineers use a Mac as their personal machine, although 90% using Homebrew is probably an exaggeration. A lot of Googlers use their corp machine as their personal one (they're not supposed to, but it's hard to police when all you do is surf the web), and the majority of them don't have side projects outside of work. I didn't install Homebrew until after I left the company, since before then all my code belonged to Google.

> If you are hiring the Homebrew dev, and your devs currently use Homebrew, why wouldn't you hire him to work on Homebrew for you?

Macs account for something like 8% of the total marketplace of all PC's. For developers, they account for something like 20%... another 20% on Linux, and remainder on Windows or other.

So even if somehow having a paid Google employee work on Homebrew seemed advantageous, it would only benefit 20% of Google's staff, and 0% of the company itself (all Google servers are Linux).