ye but the mistake I made was to take his reputation and have a pre-conception about his abilities to the point where I almost didn't test him on anything.
he also fell apart in the code test, which was pretty simple (using a library I had written, which he made a copy of and edited). I have no idea how this guy got his reputation, but it seemed to be more amongst non-tech tech people, if you know what I mean (who are easier to bullshit, I guess)
when I started my career I worked with a bunch of old IBM mainframe guys who had no idea about modern web stuff but were some of the best programmers I have ever met. I could take a problem to them in a language they didn't know (so for eg. VB.NET) and they would talk me through it.
Josh Bloch admitted himself that he's kind of not really "up"-ing his knowledge/skill when it comes to tools (git, eclipse, intellij, etc) but he writes damn good code with just Emacs.
He knows his Math & Stats to debunk benchmark and stuff like that and he knows the pitfalls of complexity.