I think it was homebrew, that one is famous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9695102

So why is this such a big deal? The assumption here is that passing a Google interview is /the/ bar for success as a software engineer. Guy builds homebrew (success) and guy fails google interview (fail). Cognitive dissonance!

It's not surprising that there are a diverse set of skills required for building good software, especially if one is playing every role by themselves. Then it's also not surprising that at a large corporate environment, each one of these roles are usually taken on by separate people, and there is a lot more specialization. Then it's not surprising that they're ignoring all the other skills this person brings to the table - they're probably going to be squandered. It's also not surprising that a large corporation with a massive inflow of great candidates is going to have a diluted and uninteresting interview process because no matter what they're doing, they're going to get some good or at least motivated people one way or the other. It's yet again unsurprising that they fail to take their own advice when their internal studies find out that brain teaser questions or questions that don't have anything to do with the day to day work don't really predict success, because I think a lot of people who are established there passed through that bar, and ascribe their success to it despite the evidence. So it's a cultural change issue too.

Anyway, I got rejected by google when I was in college, and I took it personally at first, and now I don't. I'm not really proud of it, but I've learned to not think lesser of myself because of it. I have a perfectly fine job that I enjoy and even more opportunities. So it's possible!

To add to this, I think it's more difficult for people who already have a hard time - people who are from underrepresented groups, people who are discriminated against by making automatic assumptions about their skill level, people whose education is not a traditional diploma. These people especially are compelled to have some other sort of unquestionable badge of merit, and one of the Big Four on the resume helps. And yet it's doubly difficult for them because of where they start, and because they can afford less to ignore such a path.

There's actually a site which features testimonials of people in tech (including quite a few well known ones) who've been rejected: http://rejected.us/

The creator of homebrew experienced this at Google. Ended up getting hired at apple.

> Ended up getting hired at apple

Interesting, did not hear about that. I wonder if a system package manager could be coming to OS X in the future.

He works on the Swift Package Manager that was released when Swift went open source a few months back.

Google is very aware that their process have a few false negatives but that way they’re pretty sure to avoid false positives.