At what point during one's career should one simply be hired at face value and be exempt from interviewing? After 10 years? 20? 30?
"I see your resume says you've been writing software for 30 years, and wrote this really well known tool. Wellllll....That's good enough for me. You're hired!"
Background: I worked at Google for 5 years and did a bunch of interviewing for them.
I don't support skipping interviews even for good candidates, but if you were going to it would work the other way around -- you'd value recent accomplishments over more distant ones.
People don't understand that cutting out folks who had their name attached to some big successes but can't solve a toy problem in an interview is usually a really good thing. It's a strength of the system more often than a weakness. You wouldn't believe the number of senior candidates I interviewed who had really impressive resumes but were clearly checked out from doing real technical work -- folks who obviously no longer lived close to the code and either were very rusty or just no longer had the temperament to spend time thinking through a slightly tricky piece of code.
One of the reasons not to skip an interview for a candidate you're confident is good is that a good interview can be a great sales pitch to come work for your company.
I've interviewed and worked with 30 year programmers and for some of them it was obvious could not program and their resumes were concocted. I would never rely on a resume.
"I see your resume says you've been writing software for 30 years, and wrote this really well known tool. Wellllll....That's good enough for me. You're hired!"