[asher_]

I find these stories somewhat amazing. I could not in a million years imagine taking a job that I had no real idea about how to do. How is this scenario supposed to end exactly? What has to happen for this to work out? What's the plan when you can't do your job?

Can anyone at all offer insight into this? Would this person have some kind of delusional plan, or simply not think that far ahead? I'm genuinely curious about how the minds of people that can do this work.

[bamurphymac1]

I guess this rather contradicts what I wrote in my comment to OP, but I can chime in.

I once bit off waaaay more than I could chew, basically taking on a tech lead role on a large project — a project that in retrospect I wasn't even qualified to be on at all.

The thing is, nobody ever really called me on it, even after repeated failures to hit deadlines, regular detours down blind alleys, etc. things finally came to a head and I quitfired with some significant bad blood for a while.

I'd say it was a mixture of causes, but the biggest IMO was Dunning-Kruger all around: on my part, with the nontechnical project owner, and with other developers on the team.

There was a lot of motivated reasoning and sunk-cost thinking going on of course. We just kept digging the hole.

So to answer your question, yeah I think delusion can easily carry you down this path.

That said: Brian is clearly passing off others work as his own, the attempt to deceive seems blatant, etc.

There's a difference between delusion and dishonesty. The failed project I led was a very expensive learning experience for several people, but lessons were learned.

I'm not sure that's as likely to happen to someone who shows bad faith from the start.

[TheFullStack]

I'm not sure either. I think people simply underestimate the difficulty of programming and think they can learn on the job. For a lot of jobs, this is probably good advice but for programming, obviously not. Thing is, it's obvious to you and me but not to a complete novice.

I have been running a coding school in NYC for about a year now and to a person, every single one said they had no idea how hard programming really is and thought they would be able to build a Facebook-level app after a few months. This mentality has to a factor.

[asher_]

I understand that people underestimate the difficulty, but this guy was paying others to do his interview tasks, so I think this fits into an entirely different category.