I have to point out something that I haven't seen anybody say here -- there is a huge amount of variety in the difficulty of these sorts of interviews.

I assume that all FAANG interviews for entry-level software devs are akin to the standard Google interview, for which you are expected to study your ass off. I have not interviewed for one of those companies, but of course I know how much people study for them, and it disgusts me. However, I have had plenty of interviews which did have an algorithm-type section (the majority of interviews I've had have had something like that), and I no longer hate on companies for doing _that_. Plenty of the problems are relatively easy, once you figure out how to talk about them -- and being able to talk through your work is a legitimately valuable skill.

But, companies that expect applicants to put in the kind of work Google expects in order to stand a chance truly are not companies I want to work for. To some extent, it's just shitty; this "game" is mostly a test of how much time you have to spend. That cost is a lot higher for people who are less well off, which irks me, but that's true of most things in life.

The thing is, you talk about being "willing to play" the game. I don't want to work in a company of people who played that game.

First -- Playing the game means sacrificing important things; you can't spend all your free time studying which data structures to use for esoteric string manipulation problems, etc. AND spend all your free time learning the fine point weaknesses of different databases, good programming patterns, etc. By the time I started interviewing for my second job, I'd nearly burned myself out making certain I was learning how to do things right, learning how to be a good programmer. My free time was spent polishing the things I was working on and endlessly reading about how to do it even better. And then I was able to go into interviews for the jobs I was interested in and do what you're suppose to be able to do in most other interviews (programming or otherwise); actually talk about the company, their pain points, possible solutions they hadn't thought of but I had experience with, etc. At that time, I could not identify anything but the simplest algorithmic complexities... but to learn more than that would have been to choose studying useless information over useful information.

Second -- What makes a person willing to play the game, when there are plenty of other companies with interesting problems to solve and good salaries (maybe not AS good)? I can't help but feel there is a cult-like love of these big companies (or maybe it's the desire to prove oneself, since only RealProgrammers work for Amazon). And I don't want to work with a bunch of people who are extra excited about something I just don't value.

Maybe I haven't been reading the right stuff, but I just don't see the appeal. I don't particularly care for any of them as companies. Sure, if Amazon decided to pursue a pilot project aimed at providing its customers with low-carbon-footprint foods, I might want on board that project -- but not just to Amazon as a whole. Yes, these companies are large and well-known, but I don't particularly care if it's one million or one billion people who download an app I worked on. I know that getting a job in one of those companies doesn't mean you're going to do something interesting or big. I've had classmates get jobs at Google and I've worked with Google employees on certain projects, giving feedback etc. There's nothing I've seen about their jobs or projects that were particularly amazing or wonderful, except for the part where you then get to say you work(ed) for Google.