Interns are supposed to be slow, unproductive, and need lots of hand holding! They’re fucking students for fucks sake.

Curiosity and motivation do not require experience.

Really? Not the parent poster, but have observed the same thing.

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.

We had some awesome interns, very interested in learning and working! I'm talking about those who weren't and surprised Google (and Facebook) hired them soon after.

So how is your interview process better than theirs, since you keep getting these lousy people? I saw many worthless people in the places I worked at before Google, then at Google I didn't see anyone close to that bad, so to me their process seems to work. They were very open about their data around hiring and scoring hires as well, and that data was very clear that the interview they arrived at was the best interview, they tried and experimented a lot and arrived at it.

Alternatively maybe those people were just unmotivated to work for you and spent their internship preparing for Google.

To be cynical, there are no dumb questions, only dumb people. Some people ask the same question over and over, and others have different questions, rather rapidly getting to very interesting questions.

There are many dumb questions. Asking me about ancient Chinese history for example. (this is a particularly dumb question to ask in the context of this thread where it is an off topic question asked to someone who knows very little about the topic)

Wouldn't this be a natural case of "check Wikipedia"?

An intern's productivity sort of lies in "how fast they learn". Can they pick up things by just being pointed into the right directions or do they need everything spoon-fed, in small doses, with repetition, to then still get it wrong?

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)

Probably ADHD, often makes you unproductive and slow when you aren't in high stakes situations. There is no interview to weed out such people since the problem isn't in their understanding, intelligence or skills.

How is laziness differentiated from ADHD?

Too be clear, I’m not accusing you of being lazy, but your description seems to apply to me and I consider myself lazy.

I did consider myself lazy as well and that is what I told people, but then I got pills for ADHD and suddenly I wasn't lazy any longer. So yeah, maybe you aren't lazy and you just have ADHD, or maybe you are lazy, I don't know, but it is worth checking it out. It changed my life, if being lazy is a huge problem in your life I'd suggest to look into ADHD more and maybe try get a diagnosis if it seems to fit.

If you're lazy, you don't care about it. If you care a lot but somehow still need external motivation to get stuff done, it could be ADHD.