5 Interview Mistakes That Cost Me Offers at FAANG Companies

Over the past three years, I've interviewed at Google (twice), Meta, Amazon, Apple, and Netflix. I got rejected by four of them before finally landing an offer. That's a lot of rejection emails. But it's also a lot of data. Every failure taught me something specific — not generic "practice more" advice, but concrete, tactical mistakes that I didn't even realize I was making until it was too late. I'm sharing them here because I genuinely wish someone had written this post before I started my FAANG journey. Mistake #1: Treating System Design Like a Coding Problem Where it cost me: Google L5, Round 3 The question was: "Design YouTube's video recommendation system." I immediately jumped into implementation details. Database schemas. API endpoints. Cache invalidation strategies. Within 10 minutes, I had a whiteboard full of boxes and arrows that looked impressive but missed the point entirely. The interviewer kept trying to pull me back: "But what are the high-level requirements?" "What ar