Not my experience. I've conducted 300+ interviews at FAANG in the last 15 years and haven't seen a meaningful drop in the hiring bar.
Based on anecdotes, I have another theory. The people that build the systems got old and are unwilling to work the crazy hours. The new folks are hired to work on maintaining these systems, and it's not fun. So overall both quality and speed declined.
> I've conducted 300+ interviews at FAANG in the last 15 years and haven't seen a meaningful drop in the hiring bar.
Are FAANG interviews these days an indicator of anything besides being good at FAANG interviews? Some of the best people I worked with that brought real value would never pass big tech leetcode interview...
FAANGs don't do leetcode. They may ask about data structures knowledge, but even their coding interviews are aimed at evaluating stuff like system design, write readable code, be coachable, and even soft skills.
Google and Netflix had hard questions as well, but they were all novel questions not on leetcode/hackerrank. However, CS algorithms 101 were fundamental to both.
Not just pure tech systems, but businesses and non-tech systems as well. And tech companies have gotten large with a ton of baggage and customers