Have you seen Facebook's early code? It's very much "Early 2000s PHP spaghetti written by undergrad on a caffeine bender at 3 am". Facebook succeeded because of catching lightning in a bottle at the right place/time, and sure, later engineers built it to scale, but let's not kid ourselves that it was due to Zuck's coding genius.

What? Gates & Allen similarly wrote "a lot of early code". Gates also acted as a Chief Software Architect in his final days at Microsoft.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100#ROM_firmware

I mean, plenty of very capable people are filtered out of Google and go on to do great things. It is bound to happen when you receive hundreds of applications and hire one person.

I don't know if they wouldn't get hired, I mean it's not like those companies never hire straight out of college, they obviously do, so expertise is not an absolute requirement. But they probably couldn't be hired as drop-in experienced SE's. Half their tech stacks are on technology that didn't even exist when they last touched code.

All of these CEO's are famous for their excellent early talent acquisition of software engineers. Microsoft and Apple for leveraging those engineers to initiate a new digital world, and Facebook and Google for attracting (and motivating) the worlds best to achieve global domination.

I mean if we reanimated Big Al Einstein today and he had a blind interview for a tenure track physics position at Princeton Physics dept he would probably fail. The field has changed too much although with months of prep he'd be able to catch up, the same as L & S could for SWE interviews.

That's exactly what I said in my first post - "I doubt any of them could drop in to a high level coding role and be productive, but they could all do intern or junior level stuff."

I mean there are Yale JDs that fail the bar exam but no one would claim that the average Yale JD couldn't get hired as a Big Law associate or judicial clerk.

They would definitely get a phone screen based on their resumes, but there is a good chance they wouldn't even make it to the virtual onsite round. It's not like the interviewers would use their products or look at their code or dissertation or whatever.

The "average Yale JD" would not get hired as a judicial clerk. Competition for clerkships is fierce, and generally only the top students get them. Any judge would probably take a "top" Yale JD, but unless the judge is a Yale graduate they'll all pass on the "average Yale JD," in favor of a better-performing graduate from another law school (usually their own).

> But ultimately, should Google have hired me? Yes, absolutely yes. I am often a dick, I am often difficult

If any of the interviewers got a whiff of that, it could have easily torpedoed the interview loop.

> Homebrew, which was used by 90% of Google's engineers at the time of his interview

This is definitely not true.

At any rate, the point is that a guy who used software used by a large portion of Google's engineering team because it was superior to the in-house solution could not get a job at Google because he failed to answer a programming question in the specific manner the interviewer wanted for a type of problem he would never actually encounter on the job. And in that vein, Sergie and Larry would similarly have difficulty getting hired at Google because other than their original algorithm, which Google has not used in over a decade, they have no modern or recent software experience and would likely fail all of the programming interviews.

It's hard to put everything in a build system like blaze but if you do, I think the outcome is superior to Homebrew.

Google is a linux shop, and you were generally not allowed to even keep the source code in your notebook.

Do you seriously believe that they couldn't come up with something better than mediocre package manager?

The real question is: knowing Google's track record of almost complete failure for the past few years, why would you believe in Google?

Google is run by the engineers. You don't get to blame the MBAs for its failures.

What are your sources?

His post also makes him sound like a dick (which he admits). Google has a “no jerks” policy that a lot of people take seriously.

Many stanford phds fail the interview process. I'm not speculating. Others have suggested this says more about the interview process than the person in question. They might be right. But here we are.

At the same time, I think the coding interviews generally are harder than what's needed to do the job well, just because there're so many job applicants so the bar gets unnecessarily high? And people who fail the interviews can still be really bright. (Also, some people get nervous and fail mostly related to that. I wonder how to avoid that happening)

Zuckerberg, on the other hand, partly coded a CRUD PHP app before moving on to executive stuff. He would probably not pass a Facebook interview without several years of intense preparation.

Brin and Page fall in between those two. They at least have several years of academic coding and their early Google work.

Yes, they're all very smart, but that's not enough to get into most FANG software engineering jobs.

That doesn't mean he could do leetcode problems.

Hell, the type of attitudes and personality that made these folks good at what they did would probably be liabilities from some the interview process.

Almost certainly true, but would they pass the coding interview?

I'm not clear why/if this is controversial. I thought it was well established that interviews are tough from both ends and that they suffer heavily from Goodhart's law.