Is this true though? I mean Google famously didn’t give a shit about hiring Max Howell (creator of homebrew) because of hazing-style pointless whiteboard trivia [0].
Creating a package manager, which is mostly "gluing things together without understanding how they work", is a very different skillset than being able to work from first principles. I suspect Google was looking more for the latter.
Speaking as someone who has written pieces of compilers, emulators, assemblers, and related software in my spare time, I can say that even mentioning those things casually is enough to get some "you did what?" looks.
The one topic from “hard” computer science that applies to package management is graph theory. Inverting a binary tree is one of the simplest operations you can do on a graph. Google may have been interested in Howell because of Homebrew, but not understanding this simple algorithm probably showed them that he didn’t have the skills they originally thought his project exemplified.
Creating a package manager, which is mostly "gluing things together without understanding how they work", is a very different skillset than being able to work from first principles. I suspect Google was looking more for the latter.
Speaking as someone who has written pieces of compilers, emulators, assemblers, and related software in my spare time, I can say that even mentioning those things casually is enough to get some "you did what?" looks.