When these companies rejected you, it was almost certainly because of your interview performance, not your experience. The good news is that you can practice for interviews. There are many resources online. Good luck!
Kind of a like a farm guy trying to make small talk with someone who's only lived in a big city, it will be noticeable. It makes it harder for both people to find common ground. Does that make sense?
You may want to see if you can find someone to meet in person to discuss this matter. Such things may only come out in person. Someone who has been in an interviewing position at a larger corporation would be ideal. You may have to troll some meetups or something for this, which isn't exactly a waste of time when it comes to trying to get a job anyhow, so it's efficient.
The big things that seem to matter are your experience, and interview performance. People at big companies come from all walks of life as well as small companies, there really isn't that much of a difference in that regard. As someone currently interviewing candidates, I really don't care if someone worked for a small company or big one - I mainly care if someone made the most of that experience.
This will be a function of one's company culture.
FANGS have a pretty high operational bar that's sometimes hard to grasp from the outside, without internships, friends and networks of exposure.
BigCos have varying levels of professoinalism etc.
But both tend to have specific expectations that can be hard to grasp when from a smaller company.
At smaller companies I find people tend to generalize, and work on smaller projects obviously.
At BigCos there's much more opportunity for specialization, and sometimes huge codebases and if you've never worked on something like that it can seem unwieldy.
I think a frame of reference is important for setting interview expectations etc..
Bingo. I think having an "inside" view of expectations is key to interviewing at these kinds of companies.
So without any insider info on how big companies operate on a high level all the way down, outside of reading web articles or forum discussions, I have to put the pieces together on my own. My personal network is pretty diffused and fragmented, too. I know a person I met at a tech meetup years ago, he now works at Amazon. But he's too busy to reply and doesn't seem interested in being a referral.
As silly as it sounds I thought the small-to-big company would be the most logical career progression, as I even compare it to a music career at one point. In that you first have to produce and sell for an indie label before getting picked up by big shots such as Sony. But my reality is me spinning my wheels in the small co/startup circuit still waiting to "make it big".
Given that, are you sure you're 100% on the technical side of interviewing...particularly algorithmic type questions? Whether you agree with the approach or not, they tend to be more common and given more weight with bigger companies.
All the other companies with some reasonable amount of public exposure, (like Zillow, Coinbase, ArenaNet, to give a few examples) interviewed me on more holistic and technical concepts, such as how would you use an API to build a website, or how would you design a database, etc.
care to elaborate? or is this the soda fountain in the cafeteria?
Quick learners can cross the Y-intercept of knowledge of those that know more but learn less quickly.
This has been a tough one in the past-interview discussion on many of the interview panels that I've been on. Given a bigger pond, would the candidate jump at the new opportunities and learn? Whether or not we decide to go that route often depends on a number of factors, both from the candidate and the current team dynamics (what's our internal junior/senior team ratio and what's our current mentoring needs/bandwidth?)
I have no way of knowing if this describes you, of course, but might at least be worth ensuring that during the interview you're not giving the above impression.
FWIW, I've interviewed hundreds of people at major silicon valley companies. I wouldn't presume to diagnose someone's hiring biases (we all have them) without more data than you can find in a single HN comment.
As an example from myself, initially my answers were "too correct". If you tell someone what you think they want to hear, they pick up on that bullshit and they trust/respect you less. I then switched to more genuine answers, which has its own set of problems: sometimes people (mostly HR) actually do just want to hear the perfect answer, or they're judgmental and snobby about the genuine answer. However, at least I'm now actively deciding what impression I give.
Once you cut out the major errors in your interview answers, it just becomes a numbers game. After you interview with enough people, you'll just click with the right company.