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 al

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.