The logic behind Google rejecting Max Howell, the author of Homebrew (2017)
Ugh. What an awful conversation. A mix of the subject, subject matter experts, Googlers, non googlers deciding they &quot;know&quot; why a specific person got bounced from an interview process which pretty well everyone agrees is broken, but for differing reasons AND people disagreeing about why he got bounced and if it&#x27;s a good or a bad thing.<p>Personally I wouldn&#x27;t have outed myself in this way. No good can come of it. It&#x27;s interesting but it&#x27;s making me wince.<p>The author wrote a million+ user SAT solving package manager for OSX which I like but he probably lacks some core &quot;fu&quot; to get through a google interview and was pissed off about it. Most of the icky debate is about how stupid the whole process is with some side shots at arrogance, knowledge, formal training which i personally think reflect badly on.. everyone!<p>Mainly, I found this a hard read because as a fully trained computer scientist back in 1982 I flunked an interview with the UK Antarctic survey, on a stupid Fortran question which I deserved to fail on, and blew my own chance of a dream job on the science programming mission. So I relate both to what he felt like, the ego hit, and the probable correctness of their decision. I was a prat. They spotted it at 20 paces and confirmed it with one quiz. Lessons hard learned.<p>He was an autodidact seeking a job in a company which values formally acquired compsci knowledge highly and misunderstood something in turn. But, the points being made stand: the interviewees form instant impressions  the questions are a winnowing method to lose candidates not find them, he assumed he had a pass in because millions of users but what they seek isn&#x27;t what he had. Still hurts to be bounced on crap. And I have no doubt just how smart he is, and wonder if other teams and other hiring models might have found it.