TL;DR: He did an amazing job in Homebrew of designing software with a fantastic UX. He did a not amazing job interviewing for a software engineer position.
Also: He understands this, though believes Google still should have hired him. (Maybe they should: but probably for UX, not software engineering)
Hah, yeah. On being a dick, I'm tempted to say "no amount of talent..." but I think it's probably just a geometric, maybe exponential increase, i.e., the necessary talent required to cover your personality deficits increases more rapidly than the deficits.
Google isn't interested in what type of value an engineer brings outside of memorization of popular algos typically studied in CS programs.
It's a bit cult like in that sense, but when you have a monopoly with no government regulation you can spend as much as you would like building the company with the people you like (see Peter Theil's book Zero to One where he writes about this).
I live write by a Google complex and have a number of friends who work there as engineers and we have had chats about the hiring process. Any Google engineer will tell you that whiteboarding A* is not part of his day to day. But it's just culture in the end.
Interviewing is hard and I don't think any company has it perfect. The nice thing about going into a Google interview is that you can know what to expect. They provide lots of study material and there are multiple books or sites out there that give sample problems that mirror common problems interviewers may ask at Google.
There are certainly negatives to whiteboard coding/algorithm interviews, but all other common methods I've seen also have their own problems. I do feel like the hiring team at Google has evaluated other methods (and continues to look into ways to improve the process), but they have stuck with the white board process. I'd say the hiring team does A/B testing like much of Google, but things have stayed somewhat similar over the years.
There are like ten different package managers for Unix-like systems.
The fact that the author thought (in his famous tweets) that developing one made him an outstanding software engineer was pure hubris. Most of the people reading this comment could have written Homebrew.
The hiring process is extremely stochastic. Especially at Google, where they err on the side of turning away qualified candidates rather than hiring unqualified candidates. If you apply and don't get a job, it is not necessarily because Google thinks you are terrible or whatever. Not everybody is good at interviewing. Sometimes the interviewer is having a bad day and it comes through on their feedback. None of this has anything to do with having written some software that lots of people use. In addition, LOTS of people have written some useful code. That's not really special.
All that said, I don't want anybody on my team who says "I am often a dick". That's not worth my trouble.
The last time I spoke with Google HR / recruitment was in 2015 and it was a mess.
Halfway through the process of doing eight interviews I was transferred to a new recruitment manager who wasn't given any of my information and essentially I started the process again.
The last and most senior technical interview I had consisted of the person asking me to write pseudo code into a static google document while I could clearly hear them answering emails / writing text messages with their phone. The technical interviewer also asked me if I had ever used Github before, which is ironic because I was cold contacted by their recruitment team due to my open-source contributions on Github.
I have to say that my interviewing experience at Google was existentially bizarre.
None of the interviewers (I think there were 6) looked like they would rate their mood higher than 3 out of 10 both before and after their time slot. The guy I had lunch with gossiped about how much he disliked it there. The interviews were pedantic to a degree I never thought possible.
You need to hit somewhat of a perfect storm to get interviewers in a decent mood and then upon receiving an offer somehow not be put off by the grey cloud of gloom you witnessed and actually accept it.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 50.1 ms ] threadAlso: He understands this, though believes Google still should have hired him. (Maybe they should: but probably for UX, not software engineering)
There is an insightful reply that touches on this: https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin...
As a former Google SWE, I pretty much agree with all of it, especially this:
> The being a dick part is an issue, if you were serious about that :).
Which is a good reminder that technical skills alone can be outweighed by attitude.
Other answers, should you desire them, are here: https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin...
It's a bit cult like in that sense, but when you have a monopoly with no government regulation you can spend as much as you would like building the company with the people you like (see Peter Theil's book Zero to One where he writes about this).
I live write by a Google complex and have a number of friends who work there as engineers and we have had chats about the hiring process. Any Google engineer will tell you that whiteboarding A* is not part of his day to day. But it's just culture in the end.
Interviewing is hard and I don't think any company has it perfect. The nice thing about going into a Google interview is that you can know what to expect. They provide lots of study material and there are multiple books or sites out there that give sample problems that mirror common problems interviewers may ask at Google.
There are certainly negatives to whiteboard coding/algorithm interviews, but all other common methods I've seen also have their own problems. I do feel like the hiring team at Google has evaluated other methods (and continues to look into ways to improve the process), but they have stuck with the white board process. I'd say the hiring team does A/B testing like much of Google, but things have stayed somewhat similar over the years.
The fact that the author thought (in his famous tweets) that developing one made him an outstanding software engineer was pure hubris. Most of the people reading this comment could have written Homebrew.
It seems like he’s come around, which is nice.
All that said, I don't want anybody on my team who says "I am often a dick". That's not worth my trouble.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15985775
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15981338
Halfway through the process of doing eight interviews I was transferred to a new recruitment manager who wasn't given any of my information and essentially I started the process again.
The last and most senior technical interview I had consisted of the person asking me to write pseudo code into a static google document while I could clearly hear them answering emails / writing text messages with their phone. The technical interviewer also asked me if I had ever used Github before, which is ironic because I was cold contacted by their recruitment team due to my open-source contributions on Github.
Never again.
None of the interviewers (I think there were 6) looked like they would rate their mood higher than 3 out of 10 both before and after their time slot. The guy I had lunch with gossiped about how much he disliked it there. The interviews were pedantic to a degree I never thought possible.
You need to hit somewhat of a perfect storm to get interviewers in a decent mood and then upon receiving an offer somehow not be put off by the grey cloud of gloom you witnessed and actually accept it.