Are there instances of people who make it through the interview, get hired, but seriously can't do the actual job?
Sherry Day
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Have you ever seen anyone "fake" their way into a software development position?
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Latest comments (45)
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.
I am just saying you are privileged enough to see other who are not good in talent or in work level compare to you as people who live on streets. Again i just repeating your words. Sorry if feel it racists. But it is what you said.
And i reported you long ago please try to good speaker before speaking.
sorry everyone doesn't have white privilege ,
sorry don't take it seriouly it just that saying "hire people off the street hit me in wrong way. Your intention may be different. But lot of poor people literally live of streets there childern study under street light and have no home. Please Do say thing mindlessly
Hi there, meet me; the faker :)
I am pure .net core developer with 11 years of experience. But switched to a pure public cloud DevOps role. I have never used Linux for more than 2 mins and all my platforms are on-premises.
Got hired, just might be due to a shining LinkedIn profile. but I genuinely want to learn DevOps and nobody was offering me this role. so I had to fake it. My employer somewhat knows this and they are willing to give me a shot with a senior role.
I am passionate to learn Azure & AWS so let me get back to you on my progress after 3-4 months.
Yes.
Reflecting on my last decade in engineering, 1-2% of hires in my orgs have been fakers. I'm using this term somewhat broadly - to me a faker is anyone who is quickly offboarded upon joining a team. It's possible that some of these situations may not be true faking (ex: Got a better job offer after accepting ours) but when you ghost a company (most common behavior) - you can only speculate.
Some examples of what I've seen:
I did this one time. I was fresh out of college and looking for a job. Landed my first full time job. Now, mind you, I had already been writing software for many years at that point and had already even taught thousands of people how to write software as well. Unfortunately, I was tossed into a massive C++ codebase and I hadn't touched certain aspects of C++ in quite some time. I spent the first 2-3 weeks on the job secretly re-learning a whole bunch of advanced C++ flying by the seat of my pants to try to write some decent code in the process and hoping no one would notice the total newbie in their midst. It worked and no one was ever the wiser.
Obviously, if you don't have the skills and knowledge in the first place, this is not a valid strategy.
That's just normal. Landing on any new site you need to learn how they do things. 30+ years of programming 20+ companies (some consulting in there) and not one companies codebase, project structuring or standards are the same as another companies.
I've seen people introduced to a project and rather than learn what's happening in the code and how it's being done there they just start adding stuff in their own style and standards.
I often saw advice to oversell yourself, maybe based on the assumption that many good developers used to be regarded as too humble or introvert or just to host and factful, which is not what marketing and business people expected.
I would still say many developers underestimate themselves and tend to be too critical, while most recruiters have not chance to bridge the communication gap, even more so if hiring companies don't know or are unable to communicate the skills they actually need. So many fellow developers kept doing frustrating employment jobs just out of fear they might never get another job quite es good / comfortable / whatever.
Faking and overselling on purpose either not very developer-like, or just did not happen in the teams that I chose to work with in the past. But I saw a lot of incompetence and fake in middle management positions, including team leaders, product owners, and scrum or whatever "masters".
I liked this post as there are many valuable answers in the comments. This discussion should be a must-read for any recruiter and anyone about to hire developers!