I'm sorry but Twitter is one of the few (if only) megaphones most people have to call out corporations for their actions. This is exactly the sort of thing that Twitter (IMHO) shines at, a platform to call down the goliaths. If I didn't already want nothing to do with working at google I would have been pushed further away by this tweet which is exactly what should happen. If google has the right to say no to someone that wrote an extremely valuable tool that 90% of their employees use then he has the right to inform the general public. Popular opinion seems to be one of the few things that can cause a corporation to change their minds or at the very least acknowledge the situation and he is expertly wielding it to his purpose. I applaud and support him in making this choice.

Edit: typo

Playing devil's advocate here (because I, personally, wouldn't have done something like that), but I can see the insult. Here's someone with a very public proven track record (that they're fully aware of, if 90% of their engineers use his software), and they're asking questions like this. They're the wrong questions to ask in this case, surely? It's fair enough to ask them, but I can understand this person's frustration if that was genuinely the reason he hasn't hired (which we have to take his word for, since we didn't witness it ourselves).

This guy can clearly ship software. The questions should have been what do you want to work on and why do that with google instead of yourself?

I don't think that it is unprofessional on his part. He is merely highlighting the absurdity of the hiring process at large tech companies.

I think everyone knows that this is not a problem exclusive to Google.

I think both you and the post have a good point.

From his perspective, I bet he's frustrated for the reasons he point out. If he never talks about it out loud, how would any one know? Keeping people silent about this issue is in the company's interest because they'll not have to really change, and they'll hire someone eventually.

I mean, I know I sometimes choke on problems I'm trying to solve in the privacy, quiet, and comfort of my own home on projects I really care about.

I don't know what went on in the interview but given what he said, I think I would be upset, too.

Too hard to say, tbh.

Why? He's under no obligation to Google. It's not like they hired him and he has to sign an NDA or be polite. He had a frustrating interview process and vented about it online, it's a pretty human thing to do. Why would that make him a bad employee?

Well, not that I agree with the sentiment, but corporations likely have incentive to hire individuals that are easier to push over and keep quiet as long as they have the skill set needed.

If you were a corporation trying to keep PR positive, would you hire someone that has shown themselves as an outspoken public mouthpiece and tip-toe around them to keep them happy, or just avoid the problem?

If the tweet is accurate in its implication that he didn't get hired because he couldn't invert a binary tree (honestly, I don't even know what that means) on a whiteboard, then I'd say the tweet is totally justified.

On the other hand, if it was a complex and reasoned decision that he's summarizing badly, then yeah, good call on their part.

Context is king here, and we have little.

Slightly off-topic but I always found it infuriating to call binary trees "binary" when some vertices have a degree = 3. :P

If you can make a convincing case at the whiteboard, maybe Google will hire you!

If occasionally venting on Twitter makes someone unhireable, most of us are fucked.

That is a pretty liberal use of the word flame.

And I'm pretty sure this is EXACTLY the type of guy you want to hire, I would strongly suspect writing mild mannered complaints about not getting hired on twitter has very little correlation with job success.

Actually, I think this is exactly what we need: higher-profile people willing to speak out publicly about the broken interview process.

I also somewhat laughed at the poster who stated "Apparently my GitHub wasn't enough."

Well, he is the author of numerous widely used open source projects. It is a bit redundant (and useless) to give him a "homework assignment when he has such an impressive portfolio that speaks for itself and of which you can assess the quality.

To be fair, though I know the situation in question: Company A wants to acquire Company B, because their product integrates well and also adds value to a particular niche of their customers. Person is one of the lead developers of Company B's product, and together they have also open sourced one of the single biggest components of their product.

i.e. "You want to buy us because of this, and a decent part of this is on GitHub, running every day, but you'd rather not look at -that- code but -this- arbitrary homework assignment".

He is doing both Google and people who were rejected by Google a favor by pointing out that Google's interviews are not indicative of real world performance. He might have hurt his own chances a bit in the process, but overall this will undoubtedly have a positive impact.

For him individually, I might agree, but the bigger issue is how one of the largest tech companies is hiring this way. I don't think it's worth focusing on this guy's understandable outburst to the exclusion of that.