I am currently working with Google. We had people who couldn't code on our team. I don't know if they were officially contractors like me or Google proper.
And in Algorithms, he could go to the board and walk through any algorithm we happened to be talking about.
In essence he was perfectly suited to white board interviews.
But when I worked with him in Software Engineering his code was unmaintainable, poorly commented, and he was very abrasive and unpleasant to work with.
It's a sad state of affairs that our industry is currently conflating the two. Or maybe the industry has only now reached a stage where the two need to become separate?
I mean, you wouldn't expect a theoretical physicist to design an experiment or, worse, a bridge.
The bridge analogy is spot on, in my opinion. It mirrors my above comment, and I couldn't agree more.
A common joke is that you don't let the theorists anywhere near the apparatus, because they'll break things.
The bigger problem apparently is that he's an asshole. Interviews can screen for assholes, but not with programming exersizes.