When people are turning their interview questions into successful companies, maybe it is time to start asking some easier interview questions. This is a visceral demonstration of how absolutely ridiculous interviews have gotten.
Also, OP launched on product hunt today. Calling them a "successful company" is generous if not outright false, though I wish them every success.
Stated less dramatically, what happened here is "I turned my design interview prompt into a real piece of software". That doesn't imply that google's interview questions are too hard. A software company asking for a deliverable that approximates software is sane.
I think the time that google demands for their take-homes is a bit much (explicitly, this is 4-6 hours. in practice, it's 20 to 30 if you want to deliver at high caliber). But the questions/prompts themselves are intentionally quite boring, and exist to see how far you can take it.
I found them to be pretty good. These kinds of questions depend somewhat on chemistry between candidate and prompt, so they ask more than one of them, which is great. The takehome I picked was the only one of the 3 offered I could even pretend to care about. Of the two asked onsite, one I felt I delivered on at only the most basic level, and one I think I could have credibly patented / raised a series A for were it a thing I cared to spend 2 years on.
This is a problem with a lot of take home assignments of many types (not just programming). If someone has landed an interview at a company they really want to work for, it's almost not rational for them to just bang out something that's "good enough for government work" some evening rather than taking the time and care to really do it properly.
But this doesn't scale if they're interviewing at a number of companies and/or otherwise just don't have much free time.
So clearly the process isn't working here.
And sometimes its easy to memorize such solutions. Translating a real life problem into a computer science one requires some skill.
Why? The big tech companies offer high salaries and get lots of applicants. They can afford to be picky.
And by the way, OP went above and beyond what they asked of him. In fact, there's a chance that this hurt his chances.
>This is a visceral demonstration of how absolutely ridiculous interviews have gotten.
This kind of format isn't standard across the industry.
I do a lot more writing than programming and, for someone for which that's one of their primary jobs, I would absolutely want to see writing samples--and, if they didn't have one they could share, they're going to need to write something custom.
I honestly don't get the max 1 hour interview process. You're probably not that special. I guess I did just have an interview over lunch once but I had known (and worked with in various capacities) the person making the hiring decision for years. Other than that, I've always had multiple interviews, if only so that multiple people could talk to me. As an interviewer, I really like having the perspective of multiple people precisely because it is a very imperfect process and people miss things.
As I said in another comment, (paid) interning and hiring someone as a contractor/consultant for a fixed period are great for situations where it works for everyone. But, if I'm looking for a new full-time position, I'm almost certainly going to pass on a position that doesn't carry with it the presumption of ongoing employment.
[ADDED: And, yes, some companies have an official probationary period but AFAIK that's mostly reserved for when a hire really isn't working out for some reason.]