They're not necessarily "lying" in the strictest sense. I've seen this problem in very large defense contractors like Lockheed and Raytheon that combine two thi

They're not necessarily "lying" in the strictest sense. I've seen this problem in very large defense contractors like Lockheed and Raytheon that combine two things: 1) a need to hire a lot of cleared developers very quickly when a new contract is won and 2) internal HR processes that make it nearly impossible to fire someone. The former makes it possible for underqualified or even flat-out incompetent people to get hired in the first place just because they're cleared and live close enough to a SCIF and the latter means they stick. At best, they'll do literally nothing and just silently sit through meetings and complete extremely menial tickets a toddler could do in their sleep. At worst, management insists they need to do real work to justify charging for their labor hours, but then they suck so much energy out of everyone else who has to hold their hand and cover their mistakes that their net contribution becomes negative. Nonetheless, it is very easy to transfer them to another team or another project that doesn't know any better and has to take whoever some higher layer of management tells them to take, and much harder to take the time building up the case to fire them, so they stick with the company for a long time. In doing so, they can build quite a long list of bullet points in terms of projects they've worked on, technologies they've used, and what not, even though they never actually learned anything useful from any of them and could not explain what any of the software they worked on actually did or how. This tends to be especially bad in companies that use a matrix organization where your department or career manager is in a totally separate hierarchy from the project-level managers you actually receive taskings from because the latter know your performance traits but the former decide where you get assigned to work and whether you can be fired or not, and they tend to have a huge incentive to staff critical programs, even if "staff" means fill in with net-negative warm bodies, because that's at least faster than filling with new hires, which also may not even be possible when you have very specific location and security requirements.