My theory is more subtle. I think that the long, opaque, fairly bureaucratic hiring experience is a type of "shit test" (to co-opt the term used in another les

My theory is more subtle. I think that the long, opaque, fairly bureaucratic hiring experience is a type of "shit test" (to co-opt the term used in another less-respected community). These companies need insecure overachievers. People that are brilliant, but aren't so sure of themselves that they will jump ship after the 2nd reorg in 14 months, after being passed over for promotion because their solution didn't demonstrate "complexity", after completing a 15 point launch review to add a checkbox to a webapp. The type of people that won't be too disappointed in plugging leaks in a data analytics pipeline for 2 years after they spent 6 months Leetcoding and cramming "Designing Data Intensive Applications". It also has the effect that the timing of your FANG offer is hard to predict, so it's hard to align with other offers for leverage.