[swiftcoder]

I don't think I've ever been asked a question at a FAANG interview that isn't in one of the (legion of) "FAANG interview prep" books/sites that ex-FAANG engineers and interviewees constantly publish and update.

Your criteria here is likely unfairly dinging pretty much everyone who has done significant interview prep.

[Bahamut]

But significant interview prep hurts the primary job of the interviewer, which is to evaluate whether candidates would work well within the team/org - I don't mind if candidates do preparation or not, but the point isn't to try to find people who game the process, the point is to find out if a candidate is likely to be successful in the role. The problem is oftentimes it turns out that a lot of candidates who focus too heavily on preparation fail to demonstrate the qualities needed to be successful.

I don't give a particularly hard interview, candidates and interviewers who pair with me are all pretty happy with the session & almost always leave relaxed, which is usually targeted towards a certain set of leadership traits (and occasionally I'll do coding screens as well although I've been put on those less in general). My interview feedback also has generally been corroborated by other interviewers in debriefs as well, so it's not like it's in crazy land.

[swiftcoder]

FAANG recruiters literally send the candidates emails that say things like "you should study Cracking the Code Interview beforehand". No, they aren't supposed to, and no, the incentives aren't set up correctly to prevent it (I've received these emails from Google, FB, and Amazon recruiters in the past).

We can't really go around penalizing behaviours that the recruiting side of the house is actively encouraging shrug

[Bahamut]

I can definitely tell you that our recruiters do not tell candidates to do that.