[mettamage]

How do you get past the interview stage if you don't know the difference between = and ==?

Leetcode problems require you to know that.

[smorgusofborg]

Google seems to limit people to testing in a few similar abstracted assembly languages, but they buy out startups which might be using languages that discourage these simple loops, reassignments, etc that "every programmer uses".

So quite possibly this was a perfectly good architect/programmer from a successful product who was turned into a C++ engineer on paper but never actually accepted the new role and only continued to architect.