One unfortunate side effect of being at a FAANG company is that most of your best work is probably proprietary and you will never have the chance to show it to anyone outside the company, nor will you have much free time for personal projects.

As an interviewer, I can definitely say that GitHub has become a bigger part of helping to evaluate people.

> As an interviewer, I can definitely say that GitHub has become a bigger part of helping to evaluate people.

Many people can’t work on open source, either due to a lack of time or corporate policy.

Every time the interview story of the guy behind Homebrew gets brought up, there’s the reminder that he interviewed for a software engineering position while he would’ve been better suited for a product manager position — he also mentions this as such.

The author of Homebrew was rejected for software engineering at Google, which was perfectly reasonable given what he has said about his own skills. He has demonstrated very good product management aptitude on the other hand; it would be far more concerning if he were rejected from a PM role.

> he has demonstrated very good product management aptitude on the other hand

Not to diminish his accomplishment... he could be a good candidate for PM but his tool is more of a dev-tool (so I suppose this is a niche-ish?)

In Howell's own words from https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin...:

> I wrote a simple package manager. Anyone could write one. And in fact mine is pretty bad. It doesn't do dependency management properly. It doesn’t handle edge case behavior well. It isn’t well tested.

From later in his same post...

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.

> I am often difficult, I often don’t know computer science, but. BUT. I make really good things

Having worked with people who are dicks but make really good things...I wouldn't want him on my team either. There are plenty of people who make really good things and aren't dicks.

Gotta agree. People sometimes underestimate the power of actually getting along with others!

> There certainly are those who have developed a significant open source project but who get rejected by the FAANG companies, the author of Homebrew being a recent infamous example.

It’s always possible that Google felt he wasn’t what they needed. And keep in mind that Howell ended up being hired by Apple and working there for a while.