You'd be surprised. In an industry rife with impostor syndrome, and the perception that it takes intelligence to pass a FANG algorithm interview (it does, but hard work and discipline beats raw intelligence), there's a strong disincentive to admit that "hey, I studied really hard, for months in order to get this job" when there's an expectation that your coworkers and peers will look down on you after this comes to light.

"Grinding leetcode" is a phrase for a reason!

You would think that if the interview process was filtering on anxiety levels it would lead these companies to be full of people with high confidence which would mean imposter syndrome would not be a widespread issue.

Filtering on anxiety levels doesn't mean you're selecting for confidence generally, it means you are selecting for people who are not anxious in the interview. If you practice for 1-4 hours per day for a month or more (as I did last time I was on the market) on a particular skill (like tech interviews), you become more confident at that thing. Grinding tech interview practice works, which is not great, for either side, because it's mostly orthogonal to actual job performance.

Impostor syndrome is most present in elite environments though. It's a syndrome because someone is genuinely talented but surrounded by high talent for each person it's easy to identify an area where they are better than you. In some cases it's easy to feel like you're not the best at anything in your work social circle.

Some people have high anxiety levels but still perform well under pressure. The anxiety gets sublimated into other behaviors, or bottled up until after the interview, or meditated away, etc. Even people that can handle high anxiety levels can still get impostor syndrome.

I think you are very wrong. Every single software person I know at a FAANG spend multiple weeks studying leetcode style questions.

Think about it: you are passing an exam. Why wouldn't you study the questions that you know are going to get asked?

It got even worse lately since every candidate does this, it raises the bar for the expected solution.

Maybe the people you know there are not that great.

Looking at your history, looks like you work for Google and bought into the cult that you must be great because you passed the interview.

maybe the people you know there don't want to admit they spent some time studying questions? Maybe they bought into the cult of the "Google only hire the top 1%?" (which is very far from being the case).

FAANGs interview are the most predictable tech interview in the industry, why wouldn't you do it?

Looking at your history, you are biased against Google and bought into that cult. (this works both ways, you're not making a point by attacking me personally).

Looks like you got rejected and found a reason to attack everyone who works there. Like I said, this works both ways.

Whiteboarding algorithm puzzles with code really does not define the greatness of an engineer. If people are practicing questions to be able to think along those lines and that is proven to work, maybe it really isn’t a test of greatness anyway.

This is the exact attitude that makes people have terrible interview experience.

How could you say that, they work in FAANG!