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Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

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Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#121

Post by waterlesscloud »

aaggarwal wrote: post #98
thethimble wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of the problem from Google's perspective though. At some point, you have tens of thousands of candidates and you need a system to quantify how good they are. Further, it's reasonable to have false negatives (people you don't hire that should have been hired) but really bad to have false positives (people that you hire that you should not have). Together, these boil down into the de facto whiteboarding interview…

Yes, exactly, since it's Google, they can afford to have strong filters which will definitely filter out a bad hire, may be at the expense of rejecting a good candidate. Their policy might expect good candidate to get absorbed in Google one way or other, but they definitely want to filter a bad hire. However, in the recent years, I have seen this to be not working as expected. Still, I don't think it matters to Googl…

"they can afford to have strong filters which will definitely filter out a bad hire, may be at the expense of rejecting a good candidate"

Can they, though? Obviously they believe they can, but are they correct?

Google's not going away any time soon, but they could easily slip a long way down from the top of the heap. There are signs that's started to happen.

I don't think they can be nearly as casual about losing top candidates as they seem to believe. In five or ten years we'll know, I suppose.

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#122

Post by seccess »

to3m wrote: post #79
seccess wrote: post #47

What does it mean to invert a binary tree? I'm not familiar with this operation on binary trees. Does it mean to swap parents with child nodes? Or to swap siblings?

I wondered this as well! As far as I can tell - I asked google and looked at what it came up with :) - it means swapping children.

Yeah I checked Google as well, but swapping children seemed too easy for an interview question. I'm wondering if it means restructuring the tree so a different node is the root. Trees have the property that any node can be the root and it is still a tree. Not sure just wondering if anyone had more info.

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#123

Post by philippnagel »

r0naa wrote: post #68
kenrikm wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These types of interviews work really well for the "I got 1600 on my SATs and went to {insert high profile school here} crowd" There are books out there just to prep you for Google interviews I see these as very similar to SAT test prep books. I'm not so sure Google is really interested in hiring the best engineers but rather a specific type of engineer.

> Google is really interested in hiring the best engineers but rather a specific type of engineer. I think you made an excellent point. It seems that outside a tiny minority of world-class experts, Google is more interested in hiring interchangeable workers.

That's how big corporations in general work.

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#124

Post by smackfu »

nostrademons wrote: post #103
apendleton wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may well be, but if you're considering hiring a guy who's an expert at writing package management tools, don't you put him on one of the specific subteams that needs that skillset? Surely it's something Google deals with?

The problem is that Homebrew is very different from the sort of package management tasks that Google deals with. The design goals for Homebrew include: make it easy for users, make it not require root, make it work on Macs, handle dependencies robustly. If he were at Google it would be Linux-only, he'd be using Linux containerization extensively, he'd be deploying packages to thousands of machines instead of one, it'…

If you are hiring the Homebrew dev, and your devs currently use Homebrew, why wouldn't you hire him to work on Homebrew for you?

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#125

Post by toomuchtodo »

supergirl wrote: post #59
joshstrange wrote: post #36

To all of those saying ranting on twitter is the wrong move I couldn't disagree more. Twitter is often the ONLY tool that the average person can use to communicate and/or call out large companies on their actions. This is BS and should be made known. Homebrew is an amazing tool and I'd be falling over myself getting the offer papers in this guy's hands if he came to me looking for a job. The fact that google turned h…

maybe Homebrew is amazing, but Google can hire the best people in the world. that day they might've interviewed 10 people better than him who just didn't make a popular tool

> maybe Homebrew is amazing, but Google can hire the best people in the world.

Then why don't they? I wouldn't consider "the best people in the world" those that can pass an advanced CS class.

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#127

Post by eonw »

smackfu wrote: post #60
nostrademons wrote: post #22

Sorta ironic, but remember that the point of an interview is to determine how well you'd do in the environment that's hiring you , not how good a developer you are . Because Google tends to reinvent the wheel for basically everything, algorithmic knowledge really does matter. Package management only matters within a few very specific subteams. If you're interviewing for a general SWE position, you could be Mark Zucke…

Very good point. It's like, why do you want to work for Google if you aren't into algorithms?

other then search and maps, how many of their products use algos heavily though?

many projects i have worked on over the years required very little knowledge of algos.

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#128

Post by Alupis »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #116
Alupis wrote: post #70

Has no one stopped to question what Google may have been looking for in a candidate? The OP has written some great apps, sure, but there is a huge difference between writing a package manager for Mac (among other Mac/iOS apps and utilities) and writing incredibly complex, highly performant algorithms for say search indexing, machine learning, ai, etc... In that context, knowing CompSci basics like Binary Trees (usual…

In fairness, package managers can get surprisingly complicated from a CS aspect. openSUSE wrote an elaborate reusable SAT solver library just for the dependency resolution component. Then let's not ignore that a package manager at its core must deal with the finicky nature of contemporary dynamic linking, the OS environment and all the baggage that comes with heterogenous library contexts and namespaces, maintaining…

To further your point, Package Managers have been done... and have been getting done for a long time.

Blazing the trail in machine learning, ai, etc... that's new territory where there are no knowledge bases or places you can go to source information about how to do it.

That's a different ballgame, and requires a scientist, not an engineer/developer.

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#129

Post by hn_4_muppets »

pjmlp wrote: post #112
r0naa wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google is really interested in hiring the best engineers but rather a specific type of engineer. I think you made an excellent point. It seems that outside a tiny minority of world-class experts, Google is more interested in hiring interchangeable workers.

Hence Go.

I thought Go was initially a filler project to keep the new hires going with some busy work, but they were too afraid to tell them, and released it. Hence the missing generics.

Re: Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...

#130

Post by droidist2 »

defen wrote: post #93
jowiar wrote: post #66

Last week I walked away from a Google offer that included a 70% raise. A large portion of this was a rather dehumanizing interview process, along with the realization that the process doesn't select for people I want to work with, and weeds out most people who I do. I managed to do just enough in my interviews to squeak through, but in doing so realized that it wasn't for me. Walking through the cafeteria made me fee…

> Walking through the cafeteria made me feel like I was back in CMU CS again, in a bad way. Really smart people who are really insecure about their intellect?

And that insecurity manifests itself as a facade of arrogance and condescension?
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