100%, speaking as someone who's been both sides of the equation in FAANG hiring.
Part of the problem is the sheer scale of hiring, but I think most of the problem comes down to the lack of feedback or evaluation mechanisms on the interviewing side.
They train you up, half a days worth, training tells you not to be an arsehole, not to ask stupid questions, not to have unreasonable demands of candidates, not to be biased. They don't train you in valuable skills like active listening.
Next thing you know, you've done training, and you're interviewing candidates every week or two (or more often), and there is zero feedback mechanism. No one evaluates your interview questions, no one asks candidates to provide feedback on the interviewers. No one looks to see if you've got unreasonable expectations as an interviewer, or have your expectations set too low.
You do have to do a post-interview group discussion with the other interviewers to make a yay/nay decision, but it's super easy to present what you did/asked in a positive light.
The whole system is designed around the interviewer being right and infallible. Is it any wonder the process is so completely and utterly broken?
edit: > or have your expectations set too low
This is where I bias towards in worrying, imposter syndrome and all that jazz. I've made a conscious choice to not raise that bar higher. I think the questions I ask are good, I think they're set up well enough to encourage candidates to go as deep as they feel comfortable with. I try to design them with no one true answer but have a few in mind so I can go where the candidate goes.
I also did interviewing at a FAANG and this was not my experience.
1. We trained 4-5 times on each type of question. The first few were shadows, and then we did reverse shadows where someone watched us give the interview and gave feedback later. In one category I asked for and was allowed to reverse shadow an extra 1-2 interviews.
2. There was auditing. In debriefs where you discussed the candidate and reviewed notes, the debrief lead was supposed to closely examine what questions you asked and how you conducted the interview, with the explicit goal of making sure that the interview was conducted within spec and your recommendation made sense given performance. Shortly after I was certified to do interviews, a debrief leader (correctly) identified a major issue in an interview that I had conducted. That candidate was given another interview in the same category. Although I didn't face any official sanctions, it was definitely an embarrassing experience and made me handle future interviews more thoughtfully.
Overall, I was fairly comfortable with the rigor of the process that I saw. I'm certainly not saying the process is perfect but my experience did not align with yours.
Not if it's taken too far, as it will create new biases based around the "rigor" of the process. You end up "hiring to the process" as opposed to "hiring to the team / role". If someone doesn't have enough experience/knowledge, but they are clearly talented enough to learn on the job and look like they could accomplish great things, that person may be a much better fit than someone who knows everything but is terrible at executing or working within the structure of a large organization.
(the "lizard brain" is a myth by the way; I think you're confusing it with unconscious bias of heuristics, which is not what the triune brain theory was about)
Are you saying each interviewer just makes up their own questions?! That's ludicrous if so. Where I work, we have a standardized pool, with standardized evaluation criteria.
Everyone makes up their own. I can't for the life of me fathom how this doesn't subject them to all sorts of discrimination etc. claims (one of the reasons lots of companies favour standardised questions).
Obviously the drawback for FAANG is that standardised questions would rather rapidly leak. Very quickly you'll just end up with candidates that know how to answer your questions.
Where I work now, it's a mix of pool questions ("soft" skills) and interviewer-made questions (technical skills), but it's not a hard and fast rule to use the pool questions. I rarely use the precise wording for the pool questions, and instead adapt them to match the conversation with the candidate.
Adapting to the candidate is probably good most of the time, but don't work too hard to make that happen. Computational geometry is on my resume, and interviewers are always trying to show that they know that too by trying to bend their question into that. The exercise very often detours as they've led me way down a wrong path because they're analogy doesn't fit, and all they wanted to know was if I knew about minimum spanning trees or even just heaps.
Part of the problem is the sheer scale of hiring, but I think most of the problem comes down to the lack of feedback or evaluation mechanisms on the interviewing side.
They train you up, half a days worth, training tells you not to be an arsehole, not to ask stupid questions, not to have unreasonable demands of candidates, not to be biased. They don't train you in valuable skills like active listening.
Next thing you know, you've done training, and you're interviewing candidates every week or two (or more often), and there is zero feedback mechanism. No one evaluates your interview questions, no one asks candidates to provide feedback on the interviewers. No one looks to see if you've got unreasonable expectations as an interviewer, or have your expectations set too low.
You do have to do a post-interview group discussion with the other interviewers to make a yay/nay decision, but it's super easy to present what you did/asked in a positive light.
The whole system is designed around the interviewer being right and infallible. Is it any wonder the process is so completely and utterly broken?
edit: > or have your expectations set too low
This is where I bias towards in worrying, imposter syndrome and all that jazz. I've made a conscious choice to not raise that bar higher. I think the questions I ask are good, I think they're set up well enough to encourage candidates to go as deep as they feel comfortable with. I try to design them with no one true answer but have a few in mind so I can go where the candidate goes.