Maybe I've been just unlucky with how many times I've had to google for weird "brew doctor" type incantations to make it happy, or with how (un)smoothly I've found it + a Mac compared to using real actual Linux, but is it outside the realm of possibility that you can make something a lot of people find useful for some situations and still not necessarily be qualified for or entitled to every job out there?
If it's truly because there was an algorithm question with no correlation to what the team worked on, that sucks. But I've seen the other side of enough of these rants to take any single anecdote with a giant grain of salt.
There's a few potential audiences for rants like this, but most of them are unproductive. Other frustrated people don't have influence to change things, and hiring managers not experiencing hiring issues don't have incentive to listen to you. The group you need to find, if this is how you're feeling, is the hiring managers who aren't having luck right now. Maybe because their company doesn't have as much name recognition, or as much money to offer, or a sexy office location in the Bay Area, whatever. They're gonna need to expand their pool to compete, and that's where potential matches are. It takes a lot more leg work and sales work of the "here's why I don't fit exactly what you're looking for but why you should be confident in my ability to get there fast" variety, but it can be accomplished - I did it about 7 years ago, myself, to get from the land of "boring jobs" to the land of "interesting jobs building 'interesting' experience," and have seen other people pull off the same path since then. You also generally will do better starting in a smaller environment like that with more face time with the key players in the company, than as another line-level cog at BigCompany.
> Maybe I've been just unlucky with how many times I've had to google for weird "brew doctor" type incantations to make it happy, or with how (un)smoothly I've found it + a Mac compared to using real actual Linux,
Have you tried MacPorts? But more to the point…
> but is it outside the realm of possibility that you can make something a lot of people find useful for some situations and still not necessarily be qualified for or entitled to every job out there?
Let's drop the dig regarding entitlement for a moment. Shipping a nontrivial tool like Homebrew and getting pretty much every Mac power user (except me and a handful of other MacPorts holdouts) using it should show far more qualification for an engineering position than inverting a binary tree on a whiteboard. Software is a complete system and process involving decisions and unsolved problems, even if those problems are "how do we solve these problems in a better way than they are already;" inverting binary trees is… an algorithm. One I can probably find with ten seconds and a search engine should I ever need it.
Granted, perhaps Google was hiring for a position where knowing how to invert a binary tree off the top of your head is crucial. Who knows. And I'm sure there are people out there who know that as well as how to create, ship, and maintain a useful product. But if I personally were looking for someone to hire, I know which would impress me more.
By the way, for those wondering, if you're ever asked to invert a binary tree on a whiteboard, here's how to do it:
I like this explanation, I hadn't put it into words before but it feels intuitively correct. For most positions, your ability to communicate what you're doing to the rest of the team is way more important than your ability to write fancy code, or do something like a sample project that isn't our actual day-to-day-codebase. That communication is what's going to keep the team disciplined design wise, keep things consistent, and keep the codebase extensible. And keep morale up since everybody is capable of getting on the same page with everybody.
Dealing with ambiguous scope is the single biggest thing I want in a candidate, so if you don't like dealing with that, you're not going to like working with me anyway. But here's the thing, from my perspective: when's the last time you worked with product or business people who gave you 100% perfect information and specs up-front and then didn't change them? If you can build in a way that allows for future change based on the needs of the team/company/market, then you're very valuable.
> I've never met someone who performs exceptionally well with thinking on the spot in front of people they've never met when the grand prize is gainful employment.
I also want to know, based on this line, how many people the author has interviewed themselves. Cause I've interviewed a few (it's at least in the 100+ area) and have seen as many people do well in that sort of environment as have frozen up. Not uncommon for them to do better than I'd expect myself to do, either, algorithmically - but neither does that always translate directly to an offer, if they're bad at the communication or wrinkle-handling parts.
Something like the negative effects of concentrated poverty seems to fit Occam's Razor well enough. "The most obviously-shared attribute amongst clusters of extremely poor minorities across the country is the clustering of poverty, and here are some potential causal ways this can lead to different lifestyle habits, different levels of education, different access to health care, etc."
That seems way more likely to me than oft-hinted-at-by-the-"politically-incorrect" "here's a cluster of people who all made the same bad decisions or were victims of the same bad luck in the same way, for no underlying reason other than genetic factors also associated with the color of their skin." That's pretty damn "politically convenient" if you're not in the minority population, too - "hey guys, it's not our fault! They just suck!" Hard to imagine something more politically convenient to the lucky than that.
If it's truly because there was an algorithm question with no correlation to what the team worked on, that sucks. But I've seen the other side of enough of these rants to take any single anecdote with a giant grain of salt.
There's a few potential audiences for rants like this, but most of them are unproductive. Other frustrated people don't have influence to change things, and hiring managers not experiencing hiring issues don't have incentive to listen to you. The group you need to find, if this is how you're feeling, is the hiring managers who aren't having luck right now. Maybe because their company doesn't have as much name recognition, or as much money to offer, or a sexy office location in the Bay Area, whatever. They're gonna need to expand their pool to compete, and that's where potential matches are. It takes a lot more leg work and sales work of the "here's why I don't fit exactly what you're looking for but why you should be confident in my ability to get there fast" variety, but it can be accomplished - I did it about 7 years ago, myself, to get from the land of "boring jobs" to the land of "interesting jobs building 'interesting' experience," and have seen other people pull off the same path since then. You also generally will do better starting in a smaller environment like that with more face time with the key players in the company, than as another line-level cog at BigCompany.