
Max Howell, author of Homebrew, on being rejected for a job at Google - ksourav
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?srid=hosEd&amp;share=1
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jitl
Dupe of a discussion not even a day old:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15981338](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15981338)

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pavlov
One of the replies by a Googler explains the rejection succintly:

 _" I suspect that you are awesome as a developer in a certain place, but that
Google—at least as a software engineer—wouldn’t be the right fit for you. They
really do want computer scientists. The ability to figure out what to build
isn’t valued all that highly, because that’s not fundamentally the
responsibility of the software engineer."_

What irks me is that a lot of companies have imitated Google's hiring process
without ever stopping to consider whether it's right for them. Do they want
engineers who are computer scientists rather than engineers who can figure out
what to build?

In Google's case they explicitly don't want the latter and hire accordingly.
The company is structured to make this work -- there are product decision
makers who understand software and can feed work to the CS-focused engineering
teams.

My feeling is that most other companies would be much better off hiring
engineers with a more user-oriented mindset, yet they end up explicitly
filtering that out because they want to hire like Google.

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WalterBright
Another interesting example is Shazam, which listens to 10 seconds of music
and identifies the song. When I encountered it, I knew immediately that its
implementation must be based on a fourier analysis of the sound to generate a
fingerprint. That's because FA was a required part of my engineering
curriculum.

No matter how good a programmer I was otherwise, without knowledge of FA I'd
probably hack around for years with one inadequate ad-hoc solution after
another. If I was really clever, I may even actually reinvent FA, badly.

This is where having proper engineering/mathematical training pays off. Just
being a great programmer is just not enough.

For another minor example, I was given the minor job once of printing what was
on the graphics screen on the printer. I knew that constructing a coordinate
transform matrix was the answer, and had it running in a couple hours. A
coworker, an excellent programmer, who had never heard of matrix math, was
completely astonished at this and thought it was just black magic.

~~~
pavlov
Yet if you look at the engineering team at a company like Shazam, I'd bet a
small minority of them actually work on song fingerprinting.

Shazam is an app company. Most of the people there will be working on UIs,
serving requests fast enough, integrating with partner APIs, and other
standard software development where they never once need to feed audio packets
into libfftw or whatever.

Your other comment seemed to suggest that you feel the Boeing model should
apply here, and the people who don't work on the math-heavy product core
should be considered technicians. Is that the right interpretation?

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heeen2
They also need a decent database to find the song from a five second sample
occurring anywhere in the whole up to say 8 minute song, for their whole song
library

~~~
giancarlostoro
Also in some cases have access to not well known artists altogether.

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voodooranger
I’ve never worked at Google but my read on them is that they’re an algorithm
company, not a product company. They tend to hire algorithm nerds and pass on
folks who, like Max Howell, can design and build useful products. As a result,
their core, algorithm based, functionality is successful, but they fail at new
product design over and over, creating and retiring flawed products ad
infinitum.

~~~
rsp1984
I did work at Google and, IMO, your analysis isn't that far from the truth.
Plus every project is massively overstaffed on engineers and massively under-
staffed on project and team managers, which is by design because, you know,
SWEs at Google "don't like to be told what to do" and they will "organize
themselves"...

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dmurray
And yet, Max Howell wouldn't see himself as a PM. Even if that would be where
he could be the most help to Google! He'd want to be an engineer who makes up
for his slight deficiencies in academic Computer Science with an excellent
understanding of what Google's customers want.

Apologies to Max and Google if I misrepresented what you wanted out of this.

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nasmorn
He seems like the kind of guy that would be set up to fail at such a giant
corporation anyways. Especially if his peers would sneer at his lack of grasp
abou comp sci. Getting shit done is not exactly what multi billion dollar
enterprises are about. And making users happy is practically antithesis to
googles MO. So I think they made the right call.

~~~
gurkendoktor
Well, he did join and then leave Apple. If there's ever a Quora answer about
that, I'll gladly read it :)

[https://github.com/apple/swift-package-
manager/commits/2e8db...](https://github.com/apple/swift-package-
manager/commits/2e8dbe950f64fb5417a5c279138ec659c528443e/CODE_OWNERS.txt)

(Huge Homebrew fan here! Good API design is such an underappreciated skill.)

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knolan
I’d rather Apple hire him and give him the resources to make a native MacOS
package manager. If Apple are serious about Pro users, and their recent round
table on the MacPro suggests they might be, then allowing researchers to
easily install the tools they need is essential.

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vincengomes
He was hired by Apple and also recently he has left that job

~~~
knolan
Ah, interesting.

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emmelaich
Google's concerns are mostly for the long haul. Get it right, get it
maintainable.

Homebrew is awesome, but it doesn't meet the first of those criteria. Maybe
the second, but who knows.

Should probably have got the job though.

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partycoder
Maybe for a better fit for product manager role.

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kindfellow92
Let’s be real, nobody wants to use Homebrew. It just fills a niche for a tool
that’s missing on MacOS. People use homebrew because they search “apt-get yum
for Mac” and it’s the first thing that pops up.

In other words, the day that Apple bundles a native CLI package manager with
macOS, nobody is going to stick with Homebrew for its amazing UI/UX.

I don’t think we should be praising this guy for being a usability mastermind.
I think homebrew is successful because he was someone willing to do the grunt
work of building an apt-get clone on Mac. Paradoxically this actually reflects
poorly on him because a talented developer prefers to spend time on more
intellectually stimulating projects, not grunt work.

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lmz
Homebrew was not the first. There was Fink and MacPorts before it. I would
guess it became prominent because of the UX? Sold my mac before Homebrew was
around.

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cmiles74
Homebrew, at the time, was the first to try and build against the libraries
that came with MacOS. For a lot of packages this was a huge time saver as it
would be compiling a third the amount of code that MacPorts was churning
through.

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ohiovr
Internet-outragism I am going to use this term. Thanks homebrew guy

