> I find this idea that there are lots of fake programmers kind of nuts. I don't know about "lots", but there are definitely people out there who claim to be

> I find this idea that there are lots of fake programmers kind of nuts. I don't know about "lots", but there are definitely people out there who claim to be programmers but lack the basic competencies they claim. I've encountered several. A couple of years ago, I was part of a battery of interviews for a candidate who claimed a Master's in CS. Their resume said they had done advanced work in parallelization of video compression. I asked them about it - I wanted to know how they had handled synchronization and locking. The candidate looked at me blankly for a couple of seconds. Then they began, haltingly, to talk about web sessions and logging. We didn't hire the person, but there was definitely some bullshit along the way...