How would he even be caught, to be honest? Anyways, even if legitimate, I always assume most references are friends, friends-of-friends, or friends of family,

How would he even be caught, to be honest? Anyways, even if legitimate, I always assume most references are friends, friends-of-friends, or friends of family, or something making the reference equally meaningless, anyways. I know very well of a situation that I think most people would not believe. A well-established software company hired someone with excellent, glowing references from real people at one of the largest software companies in the world. This was for a senior QA position. After months, it came to light that the person did not even have the capability to tell you if the code they were looking at was javascript, C# or VB code. They just had never done any coding or technical work in their career. So granted, during the hiring process there was almost no consideration of testing their coding knowledge because the person wasn't really hired to write any code, and the company doing the hiring was unbelievably incompetent; but even still, it was just amazing this happened. Not the same thing but pretty close: I read an article, and I can't find it now, but I think it was UC Berkeley published something saying that reference quality for admitted students was a meaningless or near-meaningless predictor of academic success at their institution. I assume the same in the working world, unless I personally know the reference.