[carlosrdrz]

Max Howell's tweet gets pasted on every article talking about code interviews as some kind of exemplification of the problem of whiteboard/algorithmic interviews.

What some people might not know is that he reflected on that tweet two years later (3 years ago), in this Quora question: https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin...

He even explains how he actually did well in the software engineering interviews in the process.

[yongjik]

The tweet comes up every so often, but it has two problems:

(1) Most of Google's engineers didn't even know Homebrew - it just wasn't something Google used on its notebooks.

(2) There's no such thing as "inverting a binary tree." At least I haven't heard about it anywhere else.

Maybe Google's interview process is broken, but the tweet isn't really explaining much. It's just a nice soundbite.

[dimmke]

Reversing a binary tree is a real question that gets asked in interviews: https://leetcode.com/problems/invert-binary-tree/

It’s actually pretty easy if you’re comfortable with recursion and traversing trees. The tree questions Google asks in its interviews are usually much harder- it implies they were giving softball questions to him.

[pseudalopex]

Knowing Homebrew could have given them reasons not to hire him. He made bad engineering decisions and brushed off feedback. And even he said he's a dick.

[b20000]

sounds like what google does with their analytics and google drive products

[gallamine]

“He actually did well” - how would he know that? He also wasn’t hired.

[IshKebab]

It's possible they told him but given that he admits he didn't know what a binary tree is it seems unlikely he did well at a Google coding interview, where I assume 90% of people know.

> But ultimately, should Google have hired me? Yes, absolutely yes. I am often a dick, I am often difficult, I often don’t know computer science, but. BUT. I make really good things, maybe they aren't perfect, but people really like them. Surely, surely Google could have used that.

Hmm so he fully admits that he made a bad package manager and is often a difficult dick. He sounds pretty arrogant too. I wouldn't have hired him.

And yes it is bad (try installing an old version of something). Just because it is popular doesn't mean it is good. It only ever had one competitor (ports) and that wasn't really Mac focused.

It's of no interest to Google that something bad you made happened to become popular. It's not like you can repeat that on demand.

Would you hire the person that wrote Bash? Or YAML?

[pseudalopex]

MacPorts is Mac focused. People liked Homebrew because it didn't take lots of time compiling its own copies of libraries the OS had already. But MacPorts got binary packages. And Homebrew gave up using OS libraries.

[falcor84]

I would hire Brian Fox, if I could afford him.

[dmoy]

We can't know, but

> I am often a dick, I am often difficult

If that came out during interview, it could easily have sunk their packet

[gcheong]

Perhaps he felt he knew it to the extent that the problems posed weren't completely foreign to him and he felt his solutions were reasonable which was possibly corroborated through either subtle bodily cues of the interviewers or direct verbal confirmation.