He had an interview with Google and they asked him to invert a binary tree, which is essentially taking a tree of data and swapping the positions of all sibling nodes.
While most people agreed it was a pretty pointless question to ask at an interview, mxcl had a full “don’t you know who I am” shit fit on social media.
It’s more about scale. Small open source projects might get one PR a month. Your average tech company is dealing with dozens of PR every single day. Review fatigue is real in these environments