Yes we have the same interview process. This is something that no one knows about as I don’t know who interviewed him but my cynical guess is that if someone has enough power in the org and happens to sit on the hiring committee, it doesn’t really matter how well they do.

In another much better incident, we once hired someone that did poorly in some interviews because I happened to present a project they made the week before. He turned out great, and he was doing some really cool stuff, just didn’t do coding interviews well.