[jakebasile]

What is the end game for this hypothetical professional bullshitter? Let's say you hire someone who can successfully bluff past your interview. They come in on the first day, do all the HR forms, get their computer and start setting it up. Eventually they will be assigned a task, or pairing, or whatever it is you do. At this point what happens? If they are able to do the job they did not bullshit you. If they are able to do the job but not as well as you wanted, then maybe it wasn't bullshit but slight exaggeration. If they completely cannot do the job, they were obviously bullshitting.

At this point, what happens? If they can actually do the work, then you are fine. If they can actually do the work but not as well as you want, maybe they can be trained. If they are completely incapable of doing the work, every state is At Will, and though I know from personal experience firing someone is no fun, that is the risk you take.

I believe the threat of someone talking a good game but being unable to produce is vastly overstated. It absolutely happens, but the harm is minimal.

[ng12]

This relies on being able to accurately identify poor performing engineers, which is very tough at a big company. What I've seen happen is they hang around for a year or two, jump from failed project to failed project, until they either find a niche role where they can do no harm or run out of options and get fired -- but at that point they have a year or two on their resume and will find it that much easier to get the next gig.

[vonmoltke]

> This relies on being able to accurately identify poor performing engineers, which is very tough at a big company.

"Very tough"? The only big company I ever worked at was a more traditional engineering company, but identifying the poor performers was easy. The problem was the politically-savvy poor performers who used their savvy to shield themselves.

[ng12]

Fair enough -- but the bullshitters are generally pretty politically savvy :)

[wolfgke]

Thus put them into a position where political savviness will be of no use. :-)

[azraomega]

If the person who has the power to do that knows it, might as well fire them... why even bother? The person is politically-savvy generally savvy enough to smell it ahead and get promoted else where...

[wolfgke]

Because at the moment we are talking about, we yet don't know whether the new hire is a good programmer or not (he just passed the interview). Thus my point is to put new hires into positions where political savviness will be of no use until you are sure that he is indeed a good programmer, so that they don't have any option to fake anything by political means.

[mattnewton]

I do - The not to be hired pile of resumes.

[jakebasile]

The difficulty of identifying poor hires scales with their impact. If they are hard to identify, they are minimally harmful. At a big company, poor hires are diluted by size and revenue. At a small company, it is easier to identify poor hires.

[FullMtlAlcoholc]

The successful bullshitter will prepare himself for the requirements of the job by using the two weeks as an opportunity to become familiar with the relevant tech and code base.

The first 90 days on the job usually don't require much code output. This is more than enough time to either learn what is required for the job. If it's too much, you still can find someone on Fiverr that you can outsource your work to.