I am not sure why people bring up the homebrew author's case to justify the argument that "leetcode question = bad intervew question". I mean, I hate many of those leetcode puzzles, but "inverting a binary tree" is not one of them. IMO, this particular question is a good one. It is a simple manipulation on a simple data structure. I think at least a good programmer can probably discuss with the interviewer, take some hints, and write _something_? Instead, that tweet gives me a feeling that he didn't like the question and refused to think at all. Everyone knows that Google asks tricky algorithm questions, did he expect to get some special treatment because he created homebrew?

Homebrew is popular, and is indeed a very successful project, it is just not very well designed. Let me quote the author's own words:

> https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin...

> I wrote a simple package manager. Anyone could write one. And in fact mine is pretty bad. It doesn't do dependency management properly. It doesn’t handle edge case behavior well. It isn’t well tested. It’s shit frankly.

> Is it any surprise I couldn’t answer their heavily computer-science questions well?

> On the other hand, my software was insanely successful. Why is that? Well the answer is not in the realm of computer science. I have always had a user-experience focus to my software. Homebrew cares about the user.

I've done SDE interviews with random companies (and administered them), although normally they are called SWE in the bay area.

Many of the questions in leetcode have a skill rating. The easy ones- I expect most programmers to be able to figure out in 30 minutes and type out an answer. The hard ones- those are for people (as you say) doing programming competitions, or who are doing CS research and have a lot of prior knowledge and skill, or for extreme coders operating at the 10X level.

I think many people have moved to macports. In my experience, the Googlers mostly do dev in the cloud and don't depend on having custom software installed on their machines. Also I think the other big problem was that half of homebrew is broken any time you try to install something complicated.

> I think many people have moved to macports.

I did the opposite. Macports reliably broke itself every three or four months under ordinary use, and Homebrew's package selection was much more useful to me, so I switched. I also think the Homebrew CLI is above-average, ergonomics-wise.

Granted, that was about 10 years ago, but exchanges for/against brew and macports looked awfully similar then. But maybe it got better, I dunno.

They still both don't work as well as linux packaging.

I prefer it to all of those that I've used, which is a lot of them—for the specific use case of managing the tools I use on my workstation.