What does it say about FAANG interviews that many can pass them without any practical experience by studying leetCode and Cracking the Code for a year? How many SE’s do those companies have? Do you really think they are all the best and brightest?
Having done 500+ FAANG interviews I don't think I've seen anyone hired "without any practical experience". (Except new grads, obviously, but presumably that's not what you meant).
leetcode definitely helps but won't guarantee being hired. There are many things we look for that it won't help you with.
And the unfortunate fact is that merely having experience doesn't mean you are a competent programmer. We need some way to check for that, and onsite coding is the best way we have right now, even though it's imperfect. Sometimes companies ask more realistic problems ("implement this API on a laptop w/ access to docs") so it's not always so artificial, but the artificial problems make it easier to have a level playing field.
Some jobs do require people that can solve “hard problems”(tm) at scale and can’t use off the shelf frameworks. But I’ve heard (but never experienced) companies looking for a developer for a bog standard yet another software as a service CRUD app or some bespoke internal app who still think they need to do an interview process like a FAANG. That was where my dismissive attitude toward that style of interview originally came from.
Over the last few years I have kind of seen the light of day. When you’re hiring at scale, you do need a standardized process. On the other hand, while I haven’t spent a day studying any really complicated algorithms[1], I’ve spent just as much time knowing how to talk the talk of a “cloud native enterprise architect”, and it took me awhile to realize how much of a hypocrite I was being for saying that I would never jump through the seemingly artificial hoops of studying algorithms.
[1] that’s not entirely true. I spent a year or two maintaining a bespoke compiler/IDE/VM for Windows Mobile.
> What does it say about FAANG interviews that many can pass them without any practical experience by studying leetCode and Cracking the Code for a year?
It says that they can be gamed and that they aren't perfect. It doesn't mean they're entirely useless, entirely wrong, or that they generally don't select for the profiles they want to select for.
> Do you really think they are all the best and brightest?
Having worked at FAANG, non-FAANG with a lot of ex-FAANG, and non-FAANG, generally speaking, yes, I do believe that.
It's not that they CAN be gamed. It is that they NEED to be gamed.
They want you to want the position. They want you to explicitly study and prepare for the position.
Sure you could go from zero to ready to interview Google over the course of the year. But I feel like most experienced software developers would only have to study for a month or so to really brush up on interview questions.
