I've worked at multiple of the FAANG. Everyone acknowledges they study for the interview. You may occasionally get someone trying to make out they could pass without study but even then they acknowledged they studied. This isn't something to be arrogant about. It's a process designed to filter out those who'd refuse to study to get the job. You have to study. Doesn't matter if you have a PhD and write books on CS. Study. Don't be a dick about this fact. Complain in HN about a process that filters out those who can't/don't study if you want but if you're going for the job study. This is rather straightforward to the point the recruiter taking you through the pipeline will explain this in detail.

I graduated 20+ years ago from a top CS school, and this was the norm then as well, whether you wanted a job at a big company like Microsoft, a consulting company, or a hot tech startup.

The good news for me was that even though I had terrible grades, I knew how to code a Knight’s Tour or 8 Queens, work through some algorithm that appears to be N^2 but has a clever N solution, or if someone asked me about manholes, I could say “that’s a stupid question, here’s the default answer, and here’s why I think it’s a stupid question.”

I think I got 9 job offers from 10 interviews with a <3.0 GPA (before the dotcom crash).

In short, studying for the test helped with the SAT’s and it helped get my first job. When I applied to a FANG years later, there was not leetcode, just different design questions or basic things like making sure I could reverse a linked list or implement substr without an off by one error.

Study doesn’t need to be intense. I got my current job with about 6 hours of leetcode and no CS degree (although I did take a small handful of CS courses)

What difficulty did you manage with 6 hours of study?

Easy and medium. I wasn’t asked any hard questions in my interview.

While I would definitely say it's a good idea to study harder questions, my experience has been similar to yours in that I don't recall ever being asked a more difficult leetcode/HackerRank style question in an interview.

That being said, I've never interviewed at FAANG before. I suspect they are the ones who would be asking the tougher questions if only just to reduce the absurd number of applicants they receive.

I do have a PhD in CS (and even taught algorithms). I solved 500+ leetcode problems during 2 years, and failed a couple of time before finally getting a FAANG position. I'm sure that some people are smarter/faster than others, but in my case, studying was necessary.

Before preparing, I could solve most problems within a few hours. But it's far from enough. You're competing with people who are fresh out from college, solved 1000 problems, possibly who had leetcode classes! Some of my colleagues pretty much know solutions to all leetcode problem, just from the name of the problem.

> It's a process designed to filter out those who'd refuse to study to get the job.

Sure, but why exactly? I hate when FAANGs reach out to senior, employed people - then whole process afterwards assumes they're the ones begging to work there. Kind of tiring to hear the "we get soo many applicants" tone when they are the ones reaching out.