| > 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. |