Hah! Yes, I am (or pretend to be) competent, just not when writing HN comments ;). Thanks for the daily serving of humble pie. I do wonder if there's somethi

Hah! Yes, I am (or pretend to be) competent, just not when writing HN comments ;). Thanks for the daily serving of humble pie. I do wonder if there's something about .NET and a business environment that encourages this kind of behavior. When the organization's values are in their business rather than mentoring programmers, when they tell their programmers to "just get it done," you end up with IntelliSyn...Sense programmers? I've worked in various different programmer ecosystems, and I've never seen this pattern so strongly. There are of course excellent .NET programmers, I don't mean to say otherwise. And I got the feeling that several of the people we interviewed had basic talent, they'd just been trained, intentionally or not, towards this kind of behavior. We started putting VS in front of candidates precisely to deal with the kind of fuzziness you mention. We started with whiteboarding code, but a lot of candidates would have a wrong design, then add a line of pseudo-code that they claimed magically made it work. By having them write actual code, it forced them to be explicit and to deal with unexpected outcomes.