[kortilla]

>Every day I think of the Homebrew creator who got rejected by the company that uses his software daily.

Why does this surprise you? Google didn’t even employ the chefs that made the food consumed by the employees daily either.

Just because you made a thing that was useful doesn’t mean you have the skills that Google is looking for.

Homebrew was very useful because Mac osx didn’t have a good package ecosystem for one-liner installs. The tech behind it though wasn’t particularly unique or groundbreaking. So the author’s skill here was finding a market with unmet demand for a free package manager. That’s not what Google was looking for.

[listenallyall]

Identifying unmet demand is probably the most valuable skill any Googler can have, it already has enormous engineering talent. It's the difference between GMail or Android (or Search, obv), vs throwing away hundreds of millions on Google Glass or Google+

[kortilla]

Engineers don’t pick products anymore. That died a long time ago

[listenallyall]

Kind of the point - the engineers rejected the guy because (in their perception) he wasn't good enough at leetcode or some esoteric language feature or whatever - meanwhile they were blind to the fact that he possessed a skill that was far more valuable to the company, which they themselves had no ability to recognize or evaluate.

[busterarm]

Yeah most of Google's successful products are acquisitions, not homegrown.