Re:They Rejected Us
by sethammons on Friday December 07, 2018 @01:00PM
(#18629916)
I think you answered it yourself. His skill set (running, managing, community, etc) are not what Google needs (as they see it). They need someone who "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."
Your "etc" includes writing the damn thing in the first place, which indicates he is more than qualified for "will contribute to a small portion of software that will be run by a large fraction of the planet's computers".
Furthermore, for L5 and up Google is most certainly looking for systems design and engineering leadership skills.
> he is more than qualified for "will contribute to a small portion of software that will be run by a large fraction of the planet's computers".
Maybe, but for that part he was in competition with people that were simply better to "contribute to a small portion of software that will be run by a large fraction of the planet's computers".
That's where we come to my second point.
Additionally, the public perception of the Google hiring process (a perception cultivated by Google themselves) is that candidates are not in competition with anybody. It's just "do you clear the bar or not".
Companies rarely hire people in a vacuum; almost always, it's because they are looking for someone to fill a certain role (be it "we need another competent engineer who we can assign arbitrary work to"), and there are always other people that can do the same job.
If you take the tweet at face value, being dinged for a whiteboard exercise is pretty silly. But people do get hired for specific roles and just having demonstrated you're great at X doesn't mean you should clearly get hired for an only somewhat related Y.
I like to think I'm pretty good at certain things but that doesn't mean I'm a good candidate, especially at a senior level, for lots and lots of roles that, while somewhat related to my skills, aren't really in my wheelhouse.
Re:They Rejected Us
by linkregister on Saturday December 08, 2018 @02:27AM
(#18634289)
Max Howell was applying for the binary tree reversal team?
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.