I think this is an equally poor analogy as it assumes Facebook wants to hire all the good people it can, which isn't the case at all. Facebook is trying to limit false positives. They would rather deny 10 world-class developers than hire one person they need to fire 6 months later.
Facebook, who is paying a lot of people to optimize its hiring processes, has found a correlation between the objective of "lower short-term attrition / first-year PIPs" and "quiz people about the mesh size of the goal net." I'm not saying it's the best long-term or that I agree with false positive bit as a business decision, but I find it hard to believe they're doing stuff like this just because they feel like it without any data to back it up.
Also the big tech companies only need "world class" developers in under 10% of their positions. Reducing latency on Oculus Rift? OK you need a Carmack. Building a compliance portal for some new law passed in Kerblachistan? A lot of people can do that, and a company like Facebook has a lot more of the second type of problem than the first.
That's a real understatement. Privacy and legal compliance toward evolving laws in a massive codebase + many datasets spanning multiple complex systems is a company-wide effort that takes some serious system engineering ingenuity. Some of the smartest people at these FAANG companies are currently working on privacy engineering.
Facebook, who is paying a lot of people to optimize its hiring processes, has found a correlation between the objective of "lower short-term attrition / first-year PIPs" and "quiz people about the mesh size of the goal net." I'm not saying it's the best long-term or that I agree with false positive bit as a business decision, but I find it hard to believe they're doing stuff like this just because they feel like it without any data to back it up.