This reminds me of an issue I had with a coworker. Personally, I'm reluctant to answer questions about the behaviors of a codebase I work on (e.g. "what kinds

This reminds me of an issue I had with a coworker. Personally, I'm reluctant to answer questions about the behaviors of a codebase I work on (e.g. "what kinds of input can you give in field X of dialog Y?") without reviewing the code first. There are far too many combinatorial logical possibilities, not to mention the fact that a mature codebase becomes so fractured and diverse that nobody really knows what's going on at any given code location. Meanwhile, my coworker would confidently answer with whatever he thought was correct. He would often be close, but he would also, alarmingly often, be completely wrong, to the point of describing behavior that had nothing to do with the product in question. As luck would have it, none of his lies/misrepresentations ever mattered. Whatever prompted the questions ended up being unimportant, or the support issue was resolved through other means. He ended up promoted to manager, at which point the department imploded on itself under his watch. To my knowledge, he never had any idea how incorrect he was, since he was simply wildly confident in himself.