It is somewhat easy to cheat through these N+1 interviews by grinding tons of practice problems before. At least that was my strategy. Sure I can implement DFS or a linked list, but I am a pretty suboptimal developer, especially when working with huuge codebases.
Maybe they should ask to implement a feature or fix a bug in some huge OSS project. That would evaluate skills relevant for a job in FAANG more closely imho.
Everyone I've ever met who said this was a better engineer than they thought. They seemed to look at the very best engineers, see a difference between themself and that person, and think they weren't that good.
I think there is also some kind of survivorship bias - you don't hear from the people who tried it and failed.
