Yup. Goodhart's law strikes again. I am curious as to what the next as-of-yet-ungamed effective hiring metric is.
See also: college admissions. (No, that kid probably didn't do that volunteering activity because they wanted to help people, but because they were told it was a checklist item, as they were coached through college admissions. And they probably didn't learn anything, and they were coached on what to say about that in the essay. And, normally, actually productive volunteering probably wouldn't have looked like each one of those kids starting their own duplicate initiative so each could spin it as demonstrating leadership. And it's more an option for kids from families well-off enough that the kids didn't have to work jobs that would contribute better to their household income or college expenses. And don't get me started on how the well-to-do decided that "travel" would be a plus on applications.)
Then they give you your real chair.
It is probably realistic to expect someone to write something useful (although possibly small) in three days. It is less realistic to expect someone to write a useful component integrated in a large system that they have to learn, in three days.
Is that actually true? It's probably uncommon in tech but I understand it's fairly common in creative fields and--while it was a long time ago--I worked a couple unpaid internships when I was in high school in chemistry labs.
A railroad engineer intern can move cars around the yard all day, assembly trains, and other such things. However if they move the car to a loading dock where it is loaded/unloaded that is valuable work and must be paid. If the train they assembly leaves the yard for the next that is valuable work (unless they all make it back to this yard unused).
Most companies choose to pay interns rather than figure out how to not break the rules. A few have a separate intern program where they carefully figure out tasks to assign interns for training. If your intern program did valuable work you should talk to a lawyer.
Not to mention, you'd have to have a precise and well defined notion of what "analytical hobbies" are. Preferably one that doesn't carry an inherent classist[1] (and maybe even racist or sexist) bias. That part alone seems pretty tough, forget the actual definition part.
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[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-legged_essay
[1]: https://hbr.org/2016/12/research-how-subtle-class-cues-can-b...
That's the truth for me, I was shocked some of our worst* interns went on to work at Google after the summer.
* Unproductive, slow, needed lots of hand holding
All interns need handholding but some need 10x more than others. And yeah, they often end up doing another internship or so at a faang.
Alternatively maybe those people were just unmotivated to work for you and spent their internship preparing for Google.
At least in our place, we do not really expect them to be productive in the usual sense, but they definitely have ample opportunity to give us a feeling of their place on the bell curve.
(as an anecdote: We currently have some 17 year old apprentice which puts some of our seniors to absolute shame, myself included. The amount of motivation, learning hunger, quick thinking and ability to ask the right questions is really astounding, especially given that he essentially just started and has next-to-no education in our area to speak of as of yet)
Too be clear, I’m not accusing you of being lazy, but your description seems to apply to me and I consider myself lazy.
At this point the whiteboard gauntlet seems more indicative of a lack of critical self evaluation than anything, “we only hire the best because we’re the best rah rah”. Miss me with that shit.
Google's search results aren't because they suck, they're doing it to get maximum money. This is about getting maximum cash for minimum overhead. The Goog is a publicly traded company, they're about selling you the crappiest product at the highest margin. Until someone can come and seriously eat their lunch in search, it will never get better.
To paraphrase Cory Doctorow, "en-shit-ification" is explicitly the point.
They hired the best and the brightest not to make search better, but to find ways to optimally increase the stock price; good products are entirely tangential to that.
Google is beginning to show its age, I’ve seen a number of past coworkers get hired there lately that weren’t effective at their job, but I’m sure they crushed some Leetcode.