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.
Quick learners can cross the Y-intercept of knowledge of those that know more but learn less quickly.
care to elaborate? or is this the soda fountain in the cafeteria?
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..