4 ms·

What's more likely: that they managed to fool their boss and colleagues for years only to be found out by you, a complete stranger, in a 45 minute interview? Or

by giaour 4y ago

What's more likely: that they managed to fool their boss and colleagues for years only to be found out by you, a complete stranger, in a 45 minute interview? Or that they were nervous, made a small mistake, and then panicked/ froze up?

icelancer 4y ago
My first reaction despite how you worded it was that the former is far more believable in my experience, but I think it's pretty close either way.
andromeduck 4y ago
I've seen some people who appear only capable of adding to or changeing existing logic - essentially relying on mimickry. They have a strong tendency to rely on hardcoding, sometimes pasting one loop 5x instead of just adding an outer loop. It's absolutely wild.
scruple 4y ago
I've worked with these people "on the inside." My belief is that, yes, some of them do fake their way in and manage to hang on for a shockingly long time. I also agree that some of them panic from the induced stress of interviewing. I try to keep my interviews very cordial, I've been there before, too, so I'm sympathetic, and I also suffer from horrible imposter syndrome, because I am a CS college dropout, despite the fact that I've had a wonderful career with dozens of major victories over the last 16+ years. I really do get it. Despite that people who cannot program find their way in front of me, interviewing for Senior+ roles. A recent example is a Senior Software Engineer new hire (I did not interview this person) who was tasked with moving a git repository to a new upstream as part of a larger migration in the engineering org. This person proceeded to try write a sprawling bash script to handle the process in order to "preserve history." Clearly this individual doesn't understand git at all. The script wasn't even doing anything. Their other tasks, which were application development tasks, demonstrated code that was also somewhere around an intern/associate level. I left that role very shortly after because when I brought this to my management team it was made clear to me that what we needed was warm bodies. That person is still employed by my former employer, over 9 months later, making a 6-figure salary with an annual performance bonus and stock grants.
- giaour 4y ago
  > Clearly this individual doesn't understand git at all. The script wasn't even doing anything. Their other tasks, which were application development tasks, demonstrated code that was also somewhere around an intern/associate level. I think I must always take "can't program" a bit too literally, because it sounds like this person very clearly can program but doesn't understand git. I have worked with enough senior/staff engineers from exotic computing environments (mainframes, academic/scientific computing) that the idea of a senior engineer who doesn't know git is not surprising, but I would have expected such a person to ask for guidance/help. I found myself in similar situations when I joined MSFT despite having only used Linux/OS X for over a decade. I guess maybe I would suggest that you phrase your assessment of someone like that as, "this person is unfamiliar with a standard tool and does not produce work that meets my code quality bar" instead of "this person can't program," as the implies that they got and have kept their current job through deceit and/or outright fraud, and were caught attempting to defraud you.

by giaour 4y ago

icelancer 4y ago

My first reaction despite how you worded it was that the former is far more believable in my experience, but I think it's pretty close either way.

andromeduck 4y ago

I've seen some people who appear only capable of adding to or changeing existing logic - essentially relying on mimickry. They have a strong tendency to rely on hardcoding, sometimes pasting one loop 5x instead of just adding an outer loop. It's absolutely wild.

scruple 4y ago

I've worked with these people "on the inside." My belief is that, yes, some of them do fake their way in and manage to hang on for a shockingly long time. I also agree that some of them panic from the induced stress of interviewing. I try to keep my interviews very cordial, I've been there before, too, so I'm sympathetic, and I also suffer from horrible imposter syndrome, because I am a CS college dropout, despite the fact that I've had a wonderful career with dozens of major victories over the last 16+ years. I really do get it. Despite that people who cannot program find their way in front of me, interviewing for Senior+ roles. A recent example is a Senior Software Engineer new hire (I did not interview this person) who was tasked with moving a git repository to a new upstream as part of a larger migration in the engineering org. This person proceeded to try write a sprawling bash script to handle the process in order to "preserve history." Clearly this individual doesn't understand git at all. The script wasn't even doing anything. Their other tasks, which were application development tasks, demonstrated code that was also somewhere around an intern/associate level. I left that role very shortly after because when I brought this to my management team it was made clear to me that what we needed was warm bodies. That person is still employed by my former employer, over 9 months later, making a 6-figure salary with an annual performance bonus and stock grants.

giaour 4y ago
> Clearly this individual doesn't understand git at all. The script wasn't even doing anything. Their other tasks, which were application development tasks, demonstrated code that was also somewhere around an intern/associate level. I think I must always take "can't program" a bit too literally, because it sounds like this person very clearly can program but doesn't understand git. I have worked with enough senior/staff engineers from exotic computing environments (mainframes, academic/scientific computing) that the idea of a senior engineer who doesn't know git is not surprising, but I would have expected such a person to ask for guidance/help. I found myself in similar situations when I joined MSFT despite having only used Linux/OS X for over a decade. I guess maybe I would suggest that you phrase your assessment of someone like that as, "this person is unfamiliar with a standard tool and does not produce work that meets my code quality bar" instead of "this person can't program," as the implies that they got and have kept their current job through deceit and/or outright fraud, and were caught attempting to defraud you.