I haven't personally, but my ex-wife is a developer at a FAANG and she told me multiple stories of people she phone screened who couldn't actually write a simple for loop.
I don't think it's specifically FAANG but the staggering renumeration they offer IME seems to mean they [disproportionately] attract the naïve. It maybe doesn't help that the perception is that tech giants have very large numbers of developer jobs involving non-complex work that pays extremely well, and that very basic "coding" skills are valuable.
Anecdata, but from five years helping beginners through a popular online curriculum, this pattern is ridiculously common:
1. Beginner learns some HTML/CSS over the course of a few weeks.
2. Start on the JS curriculum, get stuck immediately.
3. Start to ask in forum if there are jobs [at a FAANG] just involve knowing HTML/CSS.
4. Very polite and detailed replies start to appear on forum of the form "well, it doesn't hurt to try but you might want to bear in mind that at entry level you're competing against people who have years of learning behind them", or "maybe just try to work through the slightly harder bits of the curriculum first (bearing in mind that even that isn't going give you a deep knowledge of the subject on its own)".
5. Few months later the beginner reappears talking about how they've applied to x number of jobs with no responses. And they start asking about how to get jobs working freelance. Moderators take some diazepam and start putting together more polite replies.
Anecdata as I can only see a tiny slice of self-learners via the forum; I feel for your ex though
I wonder how much of this is a FAANG problem only due to how much they pay entry-level jobs, and invite people trying to, effectively, win the lottery.
