Are there instances of people who make it through the interview, get hired, but seriously can't do the actual job?
Sherry Day
Posted on
Have you ever seen anyone "fake" their way into a software development position?
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Latest comments (46)
Once upon a time, the old IT company everybody knows, world wide project, architect (a guy from a widely known outsource country) - 100% fake skills in CV. He stayed there for at least two years (don't ask me why).
Yes. Seemed to have been because of his PhD in Chemistry. Was really successful in making others do his work. And bloating up whatever he was going on the side. Partly a reason why I left this very team.
Three times:
.2015/16: Guy stating he was a hacker and offered me a job, I left to a different country, took me two months to realise he was a complete idiot
.2019: A lady proffessed to have been a former senior dev and tester at IBM, she copied some pseudo code in java I wrote for her into the codebase, formally complained to my manager. Fired 2 months later.
.Contractor assigned to work with me on a big c/c++ codebase. It was so painful I got him making GIF's for the UI after three weeks of him breaking the codebase. I had to not only undo these changes, be rewrite all of the 'documentation'.
.More recently: I went through 30 odd CV's to find someone to work with me on a side job. A good 80% flat out lied about competency - with answered such as 'yup, easy' to eeevery question, without ansering to any depth.
The list goes on, but the idiots who try to brag themselves into this industry are beyond infuriating.
I haven't seen much lying at all by consultant devs themselves once in an interview setting, but have definitely seen the consulting companies pass them off as more relevant than they are before getting to that point.
My experience with this in the past has not been that the offshore person can't be a competent or even great developer eventually, but rather that the business just turfed somebody with a decade of relevant experience and very specific business knowledge in favour of a new grad with 6 months or maybe a year of experience programming in a completely unrelated industry.... and then considers them to be an equivalent asset.
I have few examples, in my previous company I had a group of 4 ppl that were hired through a workshop selection process. They were assigned to me for mentorship. One of them was kind of untrainable, he was rude and stubborn, doing his own "freestyle learning" which was basically just asking random questions that had nothing to do with the job, I tried to explain even those questions but we would just end up with conclusion that he does not understand but he aspires to be the best programmer that ever walked the Earth... Eventually he left the company on his own and after few months asked to return but was denied.
Second example was in my current company, we hired a guy that passed technical interview, he started onboarding process and soon after he opened a sick leave. When he returned after 3 months, we tried to engage him with tasks and we quickly realised that he had no programming knowledge whatsoever and had to be fired.
I qualified in electronics and electrical enginering way back in 1971 and then discovered microprocessors about 5 years later, so I missed the opportunity to get a "proper" education in software. However, being self-educated didn't stop me getting and holding down a succession of software jobs over the years and decades. I always had a mild feeling of being an impostor but in general I was no better and no worse than anyone else. We all made mistakes and we all got some things right, which as far as I can see is all one can really expect.
The following may be a bit of a diversion, but I was left with the belief that the software industry loves to make things more complicated than they need to be, which restricts the pool of talent available. I base this belief on the fact that even after more than half a century of development, software projects continue to have a poor reputation for achieving their aims, staying within budget or even working at all, in spite of massive efforts to ensure that this can never happen. Ordinary human brains are poorly equipped to truly understand computer code, and rather than devising ever more exotic coding structures for the benefit of computers, perhaps we should spend comparable time and effort getting computers to understand the way we think and talk. SQL, HyperScript, Excel macros and other domain-specific products point the way and low-code is promising, but we still have a way to go.
To be honest, I've worked as offshore dev, and have seen utter disaster in codebases made by onshore devs.
Problem here are the C-level people, trying to hire as cheapest developers as possible, which never ends up well, no matter from where they are sourced. :)
That is racist. Cheap offshore hires doesn't mean they are talentless. It is just that American companies exploit their offshore talents by offering them cheap prices for the work they do. Besides there are bad apples in every tree. It took a pandemic for the market to correct itself in terms of the basic pay for a dev.
The headline is quite loaded and there's a fine racial line to honestly answering this topic but I'll try and walk it...
There is usually always a specific reason that people can get through an interview process without being found out and that's a language barrier between the interviewer and the applicant. It prevents the interviewer from asking questions that will identify the issue and it means that a jargon filled word salad delivered by an applicant is usually enough to get them through.
Additionally programming is an extremely multi cultural and global career but some cultures carry false reputations which can be a detriment to everyone. It's a lose lose situation for everyone.
I've seen fantastic Indian developers who cannot get a job because the companies they're applying to have previously hired too many Bill Gates recommended candidates and now won't hire them.... why?
Because I've seen companies hire some under skilled Indian developers because Bill Gates says Indians are smart at programming and then got burned. Not the big companies though. They don't care who they grind through. The small companies are the ones.
No one wins.