The way FAANG does interviews is 100% outdated

I have pretty strong opinion on this being on the other side of the table, interviewing hundreds of people and establishing the interview processes. I'll tell you why Meta does it the way they do and then I'll give advice for how to think about these things. WHY DS&A: 1. There are hundreds of frameworks and thousands of stacks you could learn and DS&A normalize these things to a level playing field that anyone can practice in any framework or language. 2. Meta has tends of thousands of engineers and wants to keep a very high bar. So DS&A interviews allow for extreme calibration, consistency, and comparisons between candidates. Obviously this isn't perfect, but it's much better than if each team hired their own way with their own process like at Apple say. 3. All of that said, there is a bit of an academic lens because most of the engineers came from top computer science schools. So big O terms might be thrown around a little casually, and there is assumption of familiarity with common CS 101 concepts. And this might disadvantage people who are self-taught or bootcamp grads or lower-tier CS grads, that never learned these things well and only practice thousands of LC problems without knowing why. WHAT THEY ARE ACTUALLY LOOKING FOR: 1. They aren't looking for you to write out perfectly memorized solutions from LC to show you studied the hardest. 2. They are looking for two things primarily: clean code/thinking, and problem solving ability. You can write a perfect top to bottom solution and fail an interview! If you develop strong problem solving strategies, you can handle any question and demonstrate an even stronger performance.