What I learned getting acquired by Google is that if your company is below a certain size, everyone will need to do a technical interview to be hired and leveled. They tell your management to lie to you, and tell you its just a meet and greet, with questions about projects you worked on, general background stuff etc. But its actually a full on surprise technical interview. (NOTE: This was true in the early-ish 2010s, not sure if it is still the case).

Imagine walking into a technical interview 20+ years out of grad school. Then again, I'm honestly not sure if being relaxed and able to sleep the night before helped more than spending a few weeks doing interview prep would have helped.