Weirdly enough, high school in Palo Alto sucks for the same reason recruiting is hard.
Relevant anecdote: I had beers tonight with a friend who was going through some strange feelings about some acqui-hire interviewing with Google. (To be clear, Google's acquiring his company, not the other way around.) He's brilliant, and he's got literally a couple decades of experience in engineering, product, design, etc -- and yet he walked away not knowing why some of the team members were acqui-hired and others were a 'pass.'
So why does Google's interview process feel like the SATs, or this girl's description of high school? Perhaps our 'measurement' systems for 'human quality' are really, really bad. Probably because human 'quality' isn't really quantifiable (or even well-defined, or static under observation), definitely because there is no clean test for such things, and because intelligence is a slippery, poorly-defined quality, and definitely not a quantity.
High school is the worst example of this: it can be weirdly competitive, the stakes are irrelevant/stupid (scores on standardized tests?), and everything is scaled incorrectly.
For my own son (he's 4), I hope he just finds something he wants to do. I will be hugely proud if he figures out what makes him happy and does it. I would definitely have fun if he enjoyed building things, because that's something I enjoy, and I'd love to share it with him. But I swear I'd love him just as much if he became a lawyer. (No, HN, seriously, even a lawyer! if you have been sued and don't have kids you wouldn't understand; I've had both.)
Now, Palo Alto is a weird case, but I grew up in Mountain View (granted, a generation ago), and there was a little of the same competitiveness going on. But it wasn't institutional, it was parent-driven. Get enough like-minded parents in one spot, well, then I guess it feels like reality. But I think the central fiction of the entire affair is that grades, top colleges, some sort of context-free "achievement" is a first-order good. But it's not a filter for anything that really matters... for example: empathy, thoughtfulness, humility, etc. Or being able to create value for the world.
Or even capital-A achievement (which is only a poor proxy for value-creation). These qualities (and others) are more important for getting something done than pure intellect... if such a thing even exists, frankly -- I'm more inclined to believe in domain-specific aptitude than some sort of pure 'IQ' score, like a D&D character attribute... far too reductive to be real. Testing well on the SAT is a reliable indicator of being good at taking standardized tests... full stop.
And being good at interviews is 100% correlated with being good at interviews. I can't say much beyond that.