Sorry for wall of text.
Actually yes, absolutely happens all the time, it has happened to me too.
Why do you think tech recruitment is such a big business.
But it's probably not what you think.
The thing is they probably did not fake it, their skill does not match the job, and that is much more of a HR problem. Sometimes, or rather often actually, whoever is hiring doesn't really know what the requirements of the job are, and it's very likely the developer might not care to learn, or be opposed to doing things in some certain way. Even after a rigorous tech test, you can have a big mismatch. Its most infuriating experience for everyone involved.
It's pretty unlikely the job one applies to to be more than 40-50% match to where their skill is (or what they want to do). Mind you, most experienced developers are having a job they are switching, so taking a huge gamble just to "fake it".
Or a generalist got hired, where a specialist is needed.
For anything sufficiently complex, new hires would be pretty darn useless for a long time, months for sure. And a generalist is unlikely to abandon all else and specialise for single thing. So they will never reach top skill.
Say one gets hired to do React:
Ts or no ts? How do you do state and data management? Redux (with or without toolkit), mobx, react query something else? What component libraries are you using (and what version). How do you do the css, bootstrap, tailwind, some sort of css in js (not a single way)? What do you use for testing, especially e2e testing? Then you have different specialised libraries, such as MapboxGL, react flow (and thousands minor ones).
And if we talk about backend, let's say python - you have django, fastapi, socketio, numpy, pandas, and similar things most people sort of know to some extent. But it's even much broader. There are various ORMs for both sql and nosql. Add to that serverless, bunch of third party apis one needs to integrate with...
Looking just at a single project I currently work on, the libraries in the requirements.txt are over 20...
And there is lots of devops involved on top of that. Most backenders are expected and know how to use docker, but there is k8s (and different ways to do that), lots of gcp and aws specific stuff.
Now consider we are talking about person who spreads their skill as fullstack between react, vue and few backend frameworks.
And on top of all that, there is the actual "system" e.g. company code to learn.
So granted I could so easily type a "wall of text" just like that, how much of this is generally discussed in detail in a typical interview process?
To expand on my own writing,
HR or recruitment agency does not have an initiative to find you the perfect match.
The HR person does not get sacked or bear any cost if they do a bad hire, the developer which switched jobs does pay the cost in frustration, lost income and black mark on their resume.
The recruiting agency might lose some reputation, but in the end of the day if they found perfect matches, nobody ever would switch jobs - so their core business (skilled and experienced devs) would become victim of their success.
Unless we are talking about a junior dev (in which case it would be expected they are clueless), and they went for a hail Mary, there is very little sense in faking it, and setting themselves up for disaster.
What is incredibly common however is to get hired for a job, and then wonder why they hired you with certain skill, but the job is something quite else than what was discussed and tested.
I have been hired with react, and then the project I got was vue without ever using it before, any guesses how that went?
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Sorry for wall of text.
Actually yes, absolutely happens all the time, it has happened to me too.
Why do you think tech recruitment is such a big business.
But it's probably not what you think.
The thing is they probably did not fake it, their skill does not match the job, and that is much more of a HR problem. Sometimes, or rather often actually, whoever is hiring doesn't really know what the requirements of the job are, and it's very likely the developer might not care to learn, or be opposed to doing things in some certain way. Even after a rigorous tech test, you can have a big mismatch. Its most infuriating experience for everyone involved.
It's pretty unlikely the job one applies to to be more than 40-50% match to where their skill is (or what they want to do). Mind you, most experienced developers are having a job they are switching, so taking a huge gamble just to "fake it".
Or a generalist got hired, where a specialist is needed.
For anything sufficiently complex, new hires would be pretty darn useless for a long time, months for sure. And a generalist is unlikely to abandon all else and specialise for single thing. So they will never reach top skill.
Say one gets hired to do React:
Ts or no ts? How do you do state and data management? Redux (with or without toolkit), mobx, react query something else? What component libraries are you using (and what version). How do you do the css, bootstrap, tailwind, some sort of css in js (not a single way)? What do you use for testing, especially e2e testing? Then you have different specialised libraries, such as MapboxGL, react flow (and thousands minor ones).
And if we talk about backend, let's say python - you have django, fastapi, socketio, numpy, pandas, and similar things most people sort of know to some extent. But it's even much broader. There are various ORMs for both sql and nosql. Add to that serverless, bunch of third party apis one needs to integrate with...
Looking just at a single project I currently work on, the libraries in the requirements.txt are over 20...
And there is lots of devops involved on top of that. Most backenders are expected and know how to use docker, but there is k8s (and different ways to do that), lots of gcp and aws specific stuff.
Now consider we are talking about person who spreads their skill as fullstack between react, vue and few backend frameworks.
And on top of all that, there is the actual "system" e.g. company code to learn.
So granted I could so easily type a "wall of text" just like that, how much of this is generally discussed in detail in a typical interview process?
To expand on my own writing,
HR or recruitment agency does not have an initiative to find you the perfect match.
The HR person does not get sacked or bear any cost if they do a bad hire, the developer which switched jobs does pay the cost in frustration, lost income and black mark on their resume.
The recruiting agency might lose some reputation, but in the end of the day if they found perfect matches, nobody ever would switch jobs - so their core business (skilled and experienced devs) would become victim of their success.
Unless we are talking about a junior dev (in which case it would be expected they are clueless), and they went for a hail Mary, there is very little sense in faking it, and setting themselves up for disaster.
What is incredibly common however is to get hired for a job, and then wonder why they hired you with certain skill, but the job is something quite else than what was discussed and tested.
I have been hired with react, and then the project I got was vue without ever using it before, any guesses how that went?