I once attended an hackaton, and a guy doing a Phd in ML joined our team. It turned out he was completely unable to figure out how to run a python application

I once attended an hackaton, and a guy doing a Phd in ML joined our team. It turned out he was completely unable to figure out how to run a python application with 2 dependencies on his machine. He also didn't understand the HTTP protocol and kept insisting that for the users of our website to send us a request with some payload, they needed to sftp a file with the request, and then click on the website to process their file. I kept telling him that since the server was mine, I wasn't going to open up ssh access to the world and a POST request had to do. Of course he didn't know what a POST request is, and kept insisting on a loop that I had to enable sftp to upload files. Ended up with me shouting, him doing absolutely nothing besides wasting time, and everybody seeing me as the bad guy for shouting. In the end I stuck around long enough to deliver something and present it, and left immediately after; not staying to see if we had won something. That was the last time I attended an hackaton. As a result, I think when hiring I would be very very careful to select someone with a Phd in ML, as they might have done no programming whatsoever in their whole life.