well there is the story of when Google acquired youtube at the all-hands meeting the CTO addressed the engineering department and asked them how many of them had been rejected by google, and half of the people there shot their hands up. Probably they had a better windfall, and "Google could have saved more than a few billion"

On a similar vein, I recall a story that said most Googlers thought they probably wouldn't pass the technical interview if they had to go through it again. Does match with what my friends who made it into FAANG say as well - none of them are confident they'd be able to do it again with any certainty.

There's a story, mentioned many times here on HN, where Google (I think) hiring team were given their own anonymized CVs and they rejected all of them. It's a perfect example to describe the staggering level of hypocrisy at those companies.

Source please? I would love to read more about this. Couldn't find anything on Google.

Private communication, sorry. Source considered 95% reliable.

I think a major take away here is the interviewers weed out ppl who don't know complex algorithms off the top of their head but you don't really need that to make a successful app anyhow.