The rest of the story was that he was hired at a startup that was founded by two non technical brothers. The brothers got funding and hired a consulting company to build the MVP and find product market fit.
They brought him in to build out an internal team to remove their dependence on the consulting company. I was his second technical hire. He wanted to make everything “cloud native” for HA and scalability reasons. We sold access to micro services to large health care providers.
We just talked during the interview. No leetCode, no techno trivia and I came up with my proposals and even though he knew I had no practical experience with AWS, later on he told me he thought I was a smart guy and could figure it out.
Two years later when a little worldwide pandemic hit and people were hammering our services, they didn’t miss a beat.
After I basically “put myself out of a job” and had done everything I was initially hired to do, I got bored and got a job at AWS in the Professional Services Department.
Three years later, the company we worked for had had an exit, he moved on to another company and I got Amazoned. I called him up and we talked about some problem he was having with an Amazon Connect (call center) implementation. It was a service I knew well and he offered me a consulting contract on my last day at AWS.
FWIW: I also got another full time job two weeks later.
I don’t see anyone else giving me the opportunity that he originally gave me to lead his “transformation” vision. He knew I had never opened the AWS console when he hired me.