The front end skills are seriously awful but if he is doing all this by hand maybe he just needs a bump in the right direction. IBM has a lot of legacy software and projects. Their engineers are brilliant but they are like time capsules. They get on a project and stay on it for years because the money is there. When the money dries up and they come out of the 5*5 cubicle basement hole ALOT of shit has happened. Realistically, it has to come down to cost benefit. This guy has the chops but would need to be brought to speed on latest dev practices. By the time he is effectively contributing to Google it might be 18 months in. By that time he is well into his retirements years and Google has invested probably 200K(maybe more) into him.

I'm assuming they weren't interviewing him for his design skills.

Wow, I think http://www.visit-new-york-city.com is the first time I've seen an example of domain based navigation. Almost every link on the page is to the top level of a slightly renamed domain. Depending on when this was made, that could have been very expensive.

Clearly he is not a graphic designer, but he would benefit from contracting that out. The sites as they exist today give a poor impression of him. Appearances do matter.

Even ignoring all of the dates mentioned, his sites and his resume do not look like the work of somebody who has up-to-date software development knowledge.

For a minute I thought it was 1997 all over again. Google is cutting-edge stuff. What I see is someone who hasn't advanced their skills since the Clinton administration and probably believes that "all business logic should be in PL/SQL".

And some are saying that their "front end" skills are bad - they don't have to be. I can whip up something better in a day just using the default Twitter Bootstrap template and not touching a line of CSS.