[shados]

> to be considered for an offer from a FAANG company.

I don't disagree with the main point, but FAANG companies' interview questions are available all over the net. In many cases (most?) they'll literally tell you what they are ahead of time, so it's a lot more of a filter for grit than a filter for computer science aptitude.

Eg: I know for a while Google was pretty keen on asking about A* algorithms. A friend who worked there mentioned that to me. Not having a CS degree myself, my first reaction was that was a very "either you know it or you don't...maybe you can figure it out, but that's not gonna be fun" kind of situation.

At some point i saw the material Google gives out. A* was literally listed there as something that they were likely to ask.

Now, it does mean preparing for a very specific interview, which not everyone (or even most people) would be willing to do. And today I don't think Google has the reputation to pull that stunt off for much longer. But a couple of years ago, if you really wanted that free cafeteria? Its a small price to pay.

[notatgoogle2]

When I last interviewed with Google (which was about 8 years ago, I think), they explicitly told me not to post my questions to the internet, and if I recall correctly, had me sign an NDA about the questions because they want to reuse them. I don't know if that has changed in the intervening years.

[shados]

My info is also pretty out of date, but for a long time at least they would give a PDF/flier thingy with a "how to prepare for your interview" that had all that stuff listed, and it went in a lot of details.

[bazooka_penguin]

They'll generally give a list of topics but not specific questions. For example facebook may put an emphasis on graph and tree data structures and search algorithms

[neeleshs]

100% agree. It's just an "are you willing to put in the work?" filter.