Reminds me of Max Howell, creator of homebrew, when he applied to Google.

His tweet:

Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but you can’t invert a binary tree on a whiteboard so fuck off.

https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en

He later walked that Tweet back and said he shouldn’t have sent it. Seems like he has a very strong skill set in building projects, but Google needs more focused skill sets for lower level developers, so just wasn’t a good fit. https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin...

The example of the OP also reminded me of Max Howell, but the only other similar story was the one of the guy who was prompted to implement fizzbuzz, and attempted to do so in Tensorflow[0]. In the latter case, I can totally understand that he might've been turned down with such a cocky (though funny) attitude, if the anecdote is true.

Are there other notable cases of people who got turned down in spite of - or because of - their extensive knowledge in a case like this?

[0] https://joelgrus.com/2016/05/23/fizz-buzz-in-tensorflow/

The guy who decreased GTA loading time by 70% understands the difference between O(n^2), O(n*log(n)) and O(n). That's exactly what a big company is looking for, not a successful product.

The other person was much better match for a small company / startup.

I'm very sure that the GTA devs understand the difference between O(n^2), O(n), etc. They just didn't catch this particular way in which the compiler/standard library changed the complexity time dramatically. The reason for why they didn't catch it is up for debate, but it's surely not because they don't understand basic "Big O" concepts.

edit: actually, nevermind. I realize you're probably referring to the hashmap lookup part, rather than the strlen() part?

Most likely because the bottleneck for loading was somewhere else when they tested it originally quite likely the slow HDD of the consoles of the time.

GTA V came out 8 years ago, it had to run on the base PS4/Xbox One not to mention the PS3 and 360 these were the systems it was first validated on.

It also had much much less content at the time.

As the game released on PC and the amount of content grew the loading times didn’t regress but they also didn’t improve.

So when your benchmark is a console that loads a game in 5-10 minutes no one probably spent any time investigating what the bounds on a modern PC with PCIe storage should be.

I was writing about the person who couldn't ,,invert'' a binary tree. It's totally fine, he can be a great programmer, even a great CEO, he's just probably not the best fit to Google SWE role.

> The guy who decreased GTA loading time by 70% understands the difference between O(n^2), O(n*log(n)) and O(n). That's exactly what a big company is looking for, not a successful product.

I haven't been at any that have cared (none of my past jobs' have been FAANG, but several have been in the over 10k employees size.)

*SOME* potential colleagues care, and a VERY FEW managers care that you know that, but I have found that to be the exception.

I was working on the Google Ads backend, and we had a strict 20ms timeout. The managers didn't care about the algorithms themselves, but my change had a 0.1ms impact on latency in the experiment arm, for launching that you need director level exception approval.

My tech lead actually helped me by saying that the trick is that instead of trying to speed up my own code base (which was really hard), it's easier to find something to improve outside my change to balance for the 0.1ms impact inside the same experiment.