It was a bad experience with someone who utterly failed a whiteboard.
> How many bad experiences have you had with someone who did? I've had enough that I've lost count.
> I don't think a leet code question would necessarily have screened stuff like that out at all.
I'm sure I have too, but I never advocated for only whiteboard interviewing. There should be a spread covering all sorts of aspects of their abilities.
> Did you actually talk with these references about what it was like to work with him?
Of course. I have a wide variety of coworkers with a wide variety of opinions of my skill-set. I'd select the ones that I think would resonate best with you. Barring that I have half a dozen friends that would tell you whatever I want them to. I fail to see how references are any sort of magic bullet.
> That's $200k a year. I find it pretty hard to believe that he was serious.
I was another senior engineer on the project, so I definitely could have covered the work. I had deeper experience, and given his quality I could have churned things out more quickly. I suspect he wasn't offering me $100 / hour at 40 hours per week. The job had a lot of paperwork and bureaucracy involved. I suspect if I was just doing the coding parts I could have covered it at about 10 hours per week, which is a lot more feasible.
Obviously I turned this down for ethical reasons.