I remember seeing a couple of people post on here about basically becoming their own consulting company, by applying for the position (as their real selves) and

I remember seeing a couple of people post on here about basically becoming their own consulting company, by applying for the position (as their real selves) and then farming out the work to junior devs. They said they could juggle half a dozen "job" like this. Good for them, I guess, but that's real work, too; just very different work than programming. Then there was the guy who said he had enough rep to take jobs, do basically nothing until they figured out he wasn't producing, at which point they'd fire him, but meanwhile he'd collected 6 months of salary. Again, he had a half dozen of these "jobs" in the pipeline. In my own job, I've gotten roped into a years-long email chain where a legitimately hired programmer, working in our affiliated consultancy, in a foreign country, couldn't figure out how to install NodeJS to satisfy his ReactJS stack. LONG story, but who's at fault for hiring someone so clueless that they couldn't figure out one of the first steps of modern web development? I helped interview a replacement for a position I was leaving, and sat across the table from a guy who said he'd programmed several .NET and Rails applications. He was hired. When it came time for me to do the "knowledge transfer," I watched him literally open a browser, and type "Ruby on Rails." He'd never even heard of it. Again, LONG story, but they threw away everything I had written, and he used Java. It was the only thing he knew. He'd made up projects on his resume, and lied to our faces. All of these examples in this thread are just different data points along the sliding scale of trust. There are many different places to inject mistrust, and -- human nature being what it is -- someone will always find these holes, and try to take advantage of them. Don't trust. Verify.