u67583

It's not just nerves either. All interviews, but especially FAANG ones, are random. The interview might be racist, sexist, etc. They might have gotten divorced that day. The question they ask you is something you haven't heard of but they spent their PhD on. You can even do everything correctly, but the interviewer doesn't like the way you did it.

The leetcode stuff is just masochism. You will spend X months beating DS&A into your brain until someone can pullout a random question and you immediately know what questions to ask, what steps to take, and how to write it out on a whiteboard.

You say that as if your boss can't wake up one morning and fire you because they don't like the way you pour your coffee. The only thing that changes is how much paperwork they have to do to make it happen.

If you want a good career, working on your interviewing skills is the most important thing. Networking and resume fluff are close seconds. Job skill is almost irrelevant. It's an ugly truth.

Someone who able to immediately understand and write out the solution to 80% of hard DS&A questions is at least able to write code. The question is if this is honestly better than generating your own FizzBuzz. I don't think so. I have heard rumors that Google has studied employee performance predictions based on interview score and found no correlation. I would bet this is an open secret and no one knows what to replace it with that isn't enormously expensive.

She will just say that the process is designed to minimize false positives and the expense of more false negatives. A bad hire is more expensive than a no hire.

The problem is this isn't what gets you the smartest people on the planet. A small number might be interested in DS&A to that level, but most are not. They will learn enough to know how to google what they need and move on to what they are interested in. Smart people are constantly getting job offers from coworkers and bosses who move to other companies if they don't start their own.

The few smart people who do put in the effort necessary to go to the FAANG companies always leave after getting the golden sticker on their resume. They leave behind them a residue of SAT preppers who have PhD's in inversing binary trees.