I’ve always been passionate about coding, starting from my early days at Olympiad teams in high school and ACM teams in college.

Anyone who's made it onto an Olympiad team[1] of any significant geographical scale, in any category, shouldn't have to deal with this whiteboard nonsense. Maybe a few lightweight-to-medium rounds to verify that they are what they say they are. But that's about it.

[1] We don't know if that's the case with Alibek; the article didn't drill down into that aspect of his background. I'm just talking to the fact that generally, there are plenty of easy ways -- albeit somewhat subjective, and in any case not uniformly applicable to all candidates -- to be at least 87% sure that the candidate isn't a a self-deluded poser, or outright liar about their coding skills (which seems to be the default stance many interview teams take).

And the due diligence one should do to remove that 13% of uncertainty can be made far less time-consuming and grueling than it generally is. Really, if you know how to read the signals, you can much more -- and much more easily, for all concerned -- about someone's coding skills by giving them a single medium-hard, but short-and-sweet exercise... than rounds and rounds (and more rounds) of progressively harder ones, as seems to be the current craze.

EDIT: Overall this is a very heartwarming piece; if a company like Booking -- known for having had several exceptionally talented programers on its staff over the years -- can not only take on someone like Alibek, but apparently consider him to be something of a find -- then that's a pretty damning indictment of the filtering processes used by the 38 of 39 companies that rejected him.