
Max Howell's take on getting rejected by Google - whack
https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejecting-Max-Howell-the-author-of-Homebrew-for-not-being-able-to-invert-a-binary-tree/answer/Max-Howell?guest=1&amp;share=1
======
tabeth
The real question is why people care so much about working for Google. If
you're good, then you'll find success with or without Google, and if you're
not good, then why would one complain about Google not hiring them when you
don't even believe in your own ability.

It's bizarre, really.

~~~
abiox
> The real question is why people care so much about working for Google

well, one answer is easy: resume material.

~~~
mattgreenrocks
Careerism, one of the traits of a great hacker.

------
jmathai

      my software was insanely successful. Why is that? Well 
      the answer is not in the realm of computer science.
      I have always had a user-experience focus to my software.
      Homebrew cares about the user. When things go wrong with 
      Homebrew it tries as hard as it can to tell you why, it 
      searches GitHub for similar issues and points you to them. 
      It cares about *you*.
    

I love that he calls out Homebrew not being a technical marvel and attributes
its success to the fact that it does what users care about.

His skills align better with product management at Google more than software
engineering though.

It's clear when software is written or designed by someone who cares about the
user. Homebrew really is a great example of this.

~~~
ProAm
I wholeheartedly agree. If there is one thing I'd like Google to change is to
think about and care for their users.

~~~
StavrosK
Well, that's probably why he wasn't hired.

------
oliwarner
I can't be the only non-OSX/MacOS user in here wondering who the hell Max
Howell is, right? I've looked it up since.

Anyway, why does it take this much to say something we all know true? You
don't have to be a good software engineer, a good team player, even a good
person to be able to have a good idea for a program, execute it and it be
popular. Homebrew was clearly key to people being able to develop on OSX.

What I don't understand is why some of you have beatified Max. Making
something you _like_ doesn't automatically speak to its or his technical
merits. Trading on the name of your products might be able to get you through
the door but shouldn't get you through interviews, alone.

He interviewed at somewhere where they demand you're an exceptional software
engineer, academically and executionally. He's neither. The result isn't a
shock.

------
niuzeta
I still don't get why this is still an issue.

Max Howell created something that everyone uses. He's made the world a better
place for many (typically technically oriented) people. He's clearly talented
and enjoys what he does(to maintain homebrew for that long?). He does not have
a degree in Computer Science.

Google as an exclusive(as in there is a barrier to enter) community has all
its rights reserved to reject or offer an invitation to anyone. They can set
up (seemingly)arbitrary requirements and degree/knowledge in Computer Science
seems to trumps all others. So they said no.(I'm just assuming that the reason
behind the rejection _was_ the trick question.)

The two statements can both be true without putting a shade on either. Google
may have lost on getting a good talent working for them. With this debacle
permanently looming on the web(especially since we're talking about it after
few years), they have lost the prospective of working with Max Howell. Max
Howell, by writing this now and back then, sabotaged the same prospective. Who
will have lost in the end? I'd say Google by a small margin, because a good
talent with an indisputable track record is sought for.

~~~
petdance
> He's made the world a better place for many

Most importantly, that doesn't mean he's going to make Google a better place,
or that his skills will be usable at Google.

------
coupdejarnac
I have two thoughts on this. First, no single job rejection is worth agonizing
over. Would someone reach self actualization just by working at Place X?
Maybe, maybe not.

Second, I empathize with Max Howell's lack of formal CS education. I studied
electrical engineering and a bit of software engineering. I attended a top 10
engineering university in the USA, but learning stuff like the nitty gritty of
sorting is not part of the EE curriculum.

------
swayvil
To read the responses to Max's post, Quora wants me to sign on with Google.
And then, when I sign on with Google, "Quora wants to manage your contacts".

Fuck that, Quora.

~~~
ssttoo
I just add ?share=1 (or &share=1 whatever the case may be) to any Quora URL to
keep reading

~~~
jxramos
nice mooves

------
gsylvie
He just got unlucky. It's always luck of the draw with job interviews. Just
like those poker players that say they should have won the hand.

I'd like to try this in an interview: how would you re-root a binary tree such
that the ordering of the elements remains the same, but the root node of the
tree changes.

~~~
dilyevsky
+1 imo luck plays larger role than most people would like to admit.
Particularly at places like Google who just throw their CS bingo bonanza at
you, but at places that interview properly too.

------
felipemnoa
>>Google in fact gave me seven interviews and I did well in the software
engineering ones,

That is way too many interviews. I don't think I would have lasted that long.
After the second one I probably would have found the third one too much of a
pain. But if you really want something I guess you do what it takes.

~~~
dilyevsky
it's 2 phone screens (on separate days) and then 5 onsites in a single day
(with 1-hr lunch break in between). But I agree - the full day of coding
onsites is heinous and there's definite performance degradation later in the
day. source: i've done 100+ interviews @Google

------
kazinator
Isn't inverting a binary tree just this? (That's what some people seem to
think, when I search for the problem.)

    
    
      1> (defun invert (tree)
           (if (atom tree)
             tree
             (list (invert (cadr tree)) (invert (car tree)))))
      invert
      2> (invert '(((1 2) (3 4)) ((5 6) (7 8))))
      (((8 7) (6 5)) ((4 3) (2 1)))
    

Here I modeled the binary tree using two-element lists as the nodes (thus
using two cons cells where one would do) for the sake of presentational
clarity.

What are the real requirements?

~~~
rurban
I would have written the same. I have no idea what Google understands by
"inverting a binary tree", but to me it looks this. "Recursively swap left
with right." Now just convert that to an inferior language, like java or
python, so they can understand it.

~~~
sumitgt
If you are faced with a question like this in a Google interview, and you
simply state the answer above right away, you are only solving part of the
problem.

A Google interviewer expects you to ask questions and clarify any simplifying
assumptions you may have made.

For eg: Are you assuming right at the beginning that the entire tree fits in
memory? If so, Google interviewers expect you to clarify that at the
beginning. They might later ask you to modify your solution for cases where
your assumptions don't hold true.

From what I know, the biggest mistake people make during tech interviews with
the big 5 is directly jumping to solutions without probing deeper. At the
scale at which the big 5 operate, many routinely simple assumptions can be
problematic.

~~~
rurban
No, this is not what happened at my google interview. Some poor HR guy,
without any tech background read questions from his screen, and tried to match
my answers with his answers. When I gave a too good answer on something he
said "no wrong, next question". Ridiculous interviews. Twice. That's why I can
relate to Max Howell.

~~~
sumitgt
That's just the HR screen. The actual interviews are not like that.

------
ucaetano
_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._

No, Google shouldn't have hired him, and he made it very clear why: he's a
dick.

Related discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15474893](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15474893)

~~~
TillE
At least in my experience, the real dicks you want to avoid would never
casually call themselves dicks.

I don't know Howell, but that reads more as light self-deprecation than an
admission of genuine toxicity.

~~~
maxxxxx
The biggest dicks are the smooth guys who always say the right things and
never take a position.

~~~
mathattack
Or worse, who say the right things, never take a position in front of you, and
then stab you in the back when you're not around.

------
ronilan
This is well written.

The tweet was well written.

And brew, well, yah, well written.

Thanks Max for making the missing package manager for macOS. I use it, I
taught my kids to use it and will probably keep using it for the next decade.
Thanks!

And Google?

Who cares about google. It is Apple that should have hired Max. Years ago. For
making _their_ product better.

~~~
julien_c
They did

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10675921](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10675921)

~~~
ronilan
Nice!

~~~
SamReidHughes
But then he left.

------
asdfaefasdf
TL;DR >I wasn’t very clear what a binary tree was

------
oh_sigh
Only the people who interviewed Max and people on the hiring committee know
why he was rejected. Maybe he was a bad cultural fit(if he actually is a
dick?), maybe he failed horribly at answering some question, who knows?

~~~
kazinator
People who are dicks can hide that in interviews, though. They can hide it
much better than not being able to invert a binary tree, in any case.

~~~
oh_sigh
Maybe some can, but others just wear it on their sleeve out of either lack of
self awareness or lack of care. I've interviewed 200+ people in my tenure at
amazon and the company I currently work for and its shocking the number of
people who can't even be bothered to put on a polite act for 4 hours.

------
dunkelheit
The whole affair seemed stupid for me when I first read about it. The obvious
position for this guy at google is "making sure that google open-source
products are popular among developers" and he is obviously well-qualified for
it. I don't know why he applied specifically for a run-of-the-mill software
engineer position, but if google HR were a bit more flexible, they should have
asked him "Hey, are you sure? How about this other thing instead?" instead of
going through a lot of whiteboarding interviews.

------
lgleason
Google used to hire the best and the brightest. While there are still a lot of
smart people there, they have diluted that process in favor of other things
and the quality of their workforce has slipped. The truth is that outside of
search most of the other business units do not bring in nearly as much profit
and are not as critical, but they need to look like they have an encore after
search or the stock price will tank. Max is one of the many who were passed
over so that they can focus on the other politically motivated hiring
criteria, vs actual merit. Truth be told they could generate the majority of
their current profit (which is primarily from search) with a much smaller
workforce. What started out as a scrappy search startup is now a boated
corporation.

~~~
linkregister
Google Cloud is experiencing extremely rapid growth and is on its way to
significance in Google’s bottom line.

YouTube, though mature, is still important for profit growth within the
company.

There is undoubtedly duplication within the company, but I don’t know of a
simple solution for it.

Max was passed over because of the engineering interview process at Google,
which hasn’t changed for a decade. It is orthogonal to recent developments
within the company.

I agree with Max, but I don’t think there’s anything more to read into it
other than the fact that Google is extremely risk-averse to making bad hires.
Part of this is due to an almost government-employee-level of process related
to performance-related firings. An employee could likely be idle for a year
before being fired.

So the hiring process is a rational response to a highly irrational retention
policy.

