[knikes]

This is the sad truth. I spent 2 months studying programming questions, whiteboarding, and doing mock interviews to pass the interview to work at a FAANG company. I can't count the number of times I've whiteboarded the binary_search function by hand (a skill that obviously proved worthless in practice). Once you get past the interview, you can pat yourself on the back and affirm to yourself that you are 'talented', but the truth is that once you're in, its more or less like any other job (ymmv of course).