> but the kind of people who excel in each type of role will have very different personalities and skillsets. Grading them on the same curve in interviews seems like a pretty bad idea.

I haven't interviewed for senior level positions with FANG. But aren't interviews usually different based on the job? I assume that interviews for job families like front end/backend/sre should all test different skills. And if you are interviewing with a specific team the manager can judge your background and interviews for fit with their team. The interview bar for algorithms is probably too high at some places, but those skills are relevant for all engineers.

> That all makes sense for hiring people to work on big existing systems, but many of these large companies are also trying to innovate and build new products with smaller, more agile teams.

Which innovation of Facebook are you describing? Instagram, WhatsApp, or the stories?

Not products in the typical sense, but these are some interesting technologies coming out of Facebook that I can list off the top of my head (many of which I have used personally):

* https://engineering.fb.com/2014/06/10/web/open-sourcing-haxl...

* https://osquery.io/

* https://rocksdb.org/

* https://fbinfer.com/

* https://flow.org/

* https://prepack.io/

You just listed a lot of tools where a deep knowledge of data structures is extremely important :)

Most of these things need to be created to scale and stabilize the existing system.

I mean you listed several database libraries, static analyzers, and a code optimizer.

Is it your suggestion that those kinds of applications do not require solid knowledge of a variety of different data structures and algorithms?

> I mean you listed several database libraries, static analyzers, and a code optimizer.

Correct.

> Is it your suggestion that those kinds of applications do not require solid knowledge of a variety of different data structures and algorithms?

No -- precisely opposite.

Your response confused me quite a lot, but after some thought, I think I've realized how things have become mixed up. I took this for sarcasm:

> Which innovation of Facebook are you describing? Instagram, WhatsApp, or the stories?

Why did I take that for sarcasm? Because it is apparent to me that Instagram, WhatsApp and stories are not innovative. So I thought the main point of the poster I was replying to was to take a dig at Facebook. I didn't realize that we were in agreement about the importance of data structures and algorithms, but then I also didn't realize that we were still on that topic: my intention was purely to refute the [what I believed to be the implied] notion that nothing innovative was happening at Facebook.

I listed the most innovative things that happened. They were product innovations that could have killed Facebook as a company, not RocksDB or React. At the same time I'm a software engineer, and I could write a database much easier than create something that grows faster than Facebook.

I use instagram and WhatsApp, no Facebook anymore (except messenger), as young people went there (and I'm following).

TikTok is a bit too much for me though, I think creating videos for it takes too much time, while for Instagram it's easy to take nice photos while I'm travelling.

Thanks for the clarification. We're in total agreement.