For FAANGS, I bet half my interviews didn't even go to my landing sites. And no way would any of them have downloaded the app to see the complexity and performance of the application. I'm purely evaluated on algorithms and data structures. If so why bother with the projects? It's much cheaper to just spend the time to study algorithms and data structures. I'd argue I learn 1/100th of what I did. But if companies only look for what's missing out of their list of attributes (and a lot not even relevant to the job at hand), and discount the 99 other things that I have demonstrated to excel at, it's not only demoralizing, it's plain stupid.