> 1) Most companies (for legal reasons) don't tell candidates why they weren't offered a job. Maybe it was because of the binary tree question, but maybe it was for some other reason.

So when I was declined at Google I knew people who worked for Google. One looked up my profile in whatever system they used and the other simply asked the interviewer why. OP may have done the same but as you say it's unclear either way but knowing is still possible.

> 2) Homebrew is a Mac-only product, so the likelihood that 90% of Googlers use homebrew is very low. Moreover, Google does not track the software its employees download onto their laptops, so there's no way they would even know the percentage.

Most of the people I know at Google use Macs so I don't see why not. I don't know what the majority of them use but a good chunk at least do.

As far as tracking he could simply be tracking it himself and comparing his results of known Google IPs to employee counts. Not as accurate but might give a rough estimation. He may have further analytics based on data collected (if collected) by each machine.

The tweet starts out: "Google: 90% of our engineers...", which implies that this is information Google told him.

OP was obviously being sarcastic to express his frustration.

To your second point, there is an official Linux fork called Linuxbrew. http://brew.sh/linuxbrew/

Granted Linuxbrew isn't nearly as prevalent as Homebrew, but Macs are prevalent at Google.

Really? In the UK companies are legally obliged to reveal why a candidate did not get a job, if asked... in my understanding.

I'm sceptical; I've heard this before but never managed to track down a source; I also don't know if you need some specific wording for this or if it's so vague as to be useful. Case in point: when I've failed my google interviews in London, I asked for the feedback, and got a reply saying something like "Sorry, we don't do detailed feedback. We weren't happy with your performance on the interviews". Which, duh, I got that from the being rejected part :P

Huh? I've been rejected by an UK company with just "you're obviously a very experienced programmer, but "we are not able to take your application any further at this time".

I did get a code review out of it though, and it did point out a few real issues, so I'm ok with it.

Maybe I don't understand the legals fully. My experience comes from being on the hiring side. Our HR department were very keen that we kept detailed notes so that the decision not to hire could be justified in the case of a tribunal or suing situation. For what it's worth, it did make me question my motives and felt that it ensured I gave every candidate a fair shot.

They can offer non-answers :) ... in Germany they got very good writing "recommendation" letters that have some hidden hints:

http://www.goldbeck.com/hrblog/employee-references-germany-v...

In my experience it goes exactly like this just about everywhere:

job: here is your macbook pro, welcome! you: <install homebrew>

I don't have it installed on my Macs - what am I missing? I write C++ daily on them.

EDIT: Seriously, what am I missing that I'd need as a developer? My dayjob is on a Mac Pro writing desktop software and my hobby at night is on a MacBook Pro doing the same; it's on neither machine.

brew is a package manager, I can install a set of applications and libraries that will be kept up to date with a simple command line. If your coding doesn't take you outside of what Apple provide then you are probably not missing anything.

Personally I have the Android SDK and NDK, QtCreator, Qt5, cppcheck, cloc, mongodb, node, wine and others. If you are not using a variety of 3rd party tools to produce/automate your work then you probably don't need to worry.

Having all those kept up to date for me saves me so much time.

I use xcode and use wxWidgets, but I grab these manually and compile them myself. I also use the Android SDK and NDK, cppcheck cloc etc like you

I didn't realise that they could be kept up to date with homebrew?? Is that the case?

Last time I looked at MacPorts (and perhaps homebrew) I saw it as a porting of BDS/GNU tools to OSX and therefore making the OS more Linuxy to my mind. I wanted a clean break from Linuxland when I moved to OSX, hence I removed MacPorts etc. (Additionally the ported software all ran under X and not Quartz so it didn't really fit in; also, the fetched packages and compiled systems were massive in size which I didn't appreciate on a laptop that shared space with recorded audio and video etc. so space was at a premium).

Homebrew is really the default package manager. You don't need it, per se, but for the vast majority of people it'd be like trying to set up a Linux system without using apt-get or yum: an exercise in pain.

That'll explain my early Debian experiences (installing from DVD and attempting to use dpkg exclusively) and my Slackware experiences then...