Is this really what people think when joining a large company such as FAANG ? I mean not everyone can be an A player in a company with 1000s of employees, correct ? Also not every team is going to be solving hard problems. Someone has to do the dirty things. Isn't that understood ?
Not trying to shit on you OP but I would have tried to learn more about the team in interviews if possible or is that just not a thing with FAANG interviews ?
FAANG companies certainly have a lot of very bright engineers. There's no disputing that. And they contend with some really thorny problems that admit no easy solutions, such as scale and content moderation.
But there's also plenty of smaller companies that have difficult problems with very sharp coworkers. Of course, they don't have the same prestige.
Or money.
Or visibility.
Or value on your resume (in certain circles).
But what smaller companies have that I've found big companies don't: a distinct lack of places to hide.
Sure, you can get folks who don't work out (I've been one!) but at all the small companies I've worked out, everyone is pulling together and no one is really slacking. My theory is that it's too easy to see when someone is slacking at a smallco, so folks don't do it.
I find that delightful.
This right here is exactly the problem. In the interview you are expected to write a fault tolerant k-way distributed sort and publish it to production, in 3 hours. Once you are embedded in your team they'll have you fixing typos on the landing page.
"Our interview process is good at finding people who are good at interviewing, not good at their job." ~ Someone I follow on Twitter
None of the interviews had any filter for finishing tasks on time, writing good tests, improving team cohesion, or any of the many important characteristics of a great software developer.
But, gosh, I can definitely explain how Aho-Corasick works.
Similarly, you could test for ability to architect a Git commit history. Git uses some important algorithms (e.g. content addressable store, tree traversal) and people who demonstrate an understanding of how to leverage it well are likely to be more effective candidates.
There is actually an incredible amount of technical nuance in this question and you can ask this both on junior interviews and senior ones.
On top of their hoop jumping game.
I've interviewed at a few and they were the hardest interviews I've had. So it stands to reason that the people making it through must be good.
Of course you could claim the people making it through just "leetcode" all day or whatever. But still we all know these companies because they're omnipresent in our lives, we use their products, we assume they've got smart talent internally.
Depends on the FAANG, but a lot of them do pooled interviews and assign a team later. Some do a weeks long orientation/training and you have some ability to more or less interview for final placement, and there's some other styles as well. For important teams that have trouble hiring, probably some people get selected into it without a lot of choice.
Either way, in a pooled hiring environment, you're probably not meeting with people on the team you'll work for before you join, although maybe you'd get to talk to a hiring manager after an offer; maybe.
With any company of any size the scale of grunt work / tedious maintenance and troubleshooting old stuff is going to grow massively.
Being Google or anyone will not change that.
Eh. IMHO they are a group of super good test takers and white board ninjas.
Maybe they let the newbie to clean the dojo floor, and sweep the garden, and cut the wood, and take out the garbage, and paint the walls, and so on for a while and then he learns the ropes and knows more he could find himself a team that is more to his taste.
Well if you pay top salaries and have a tough recruitment process maybe. They claim to hire the best from all over the world.
FAANG usually don't hire for a specific team, you get matched after. It's a crapshoot where you end up, but they usually let you transfer relatively easily if positions are opened.
With any company of any size the scale of grunt work / tedious maintenance and troubleshooting old stuff is going to grow massively.
Being Google or anyone will not change that.
Perhaps that startup history with greenfield type situations blinded OP to that reality?