[ChuckMcM]

That is a uniquely scary story. I have only had the displeasure of hiring one person who effectively lied their way into the position. It was really obvious after they started that they had grossly overstated their skills and experience. My point of 'confusion' was that their reference checks were people who had worked with them, liked them but not for very long because they were leaving when that person joined, Etc. I had asked about many short tenures in their resume but as an individual contributor they passed it off as "finding a challenge they could bite their teeth into" and basically working their way up the pay ladder.

At Google people got "starter projects" I liked this idea to get an idea of what they could do, and its an opportunity to understand what they are good at. I gave the person an assignment that, given their experience, should have been well within their capabilities. They kept not delivering and kept up a steady patter of "knocking down the barriers" communications which, valid or not, got me wondering what was going on with this person. At the one month point I gave them a pretty clear deliverable and worked with them for a timeline for when it would be done. They were "almost" done at the agreed upon time two weeks later, so I asked them to present it one week from that date to the group. The presentation was an epic disaster in terms of not coming close to meeting the deliverable, not showing any development in understanding the problem, and generally being something a new hire could have come up with in less time.

At our 1:1 that week we talked about the deliverable, my expectations given the experience they claimed to have, and what we got. I got a lot of "I just need x, y, and z and then it will be done." kind of discussion. Delving into those needs became "waiting on p, q, and r to deliver this part." kinds of discussions.

At the end of our 1:1 that week I asked them if they were satisfied with their performance. They felt it was ok and would get better with time. I told them I didn't feel we could afford that time and that Friday would be their last day. I was bummed that we wasted nearly 2 months on this person. I don't think anyone in the organization was surprised to see them go.

[Ididntdothis]

We once hired a contractor through a phone interview which went pretty well. Then he started working and I noticed that all his work always was done the next morning. It was almost impossible to have a conversation with him about coding. He seemed to have no clue about the most basic things but when you described what you wanted it was done the next day. We started to suspect that the interview was done with another person and that his work was also done by something else. To verify I had him sit next to me and make a simple change. He sat there and clicked around the whole day but got nothing done. But, surprise, it was done the next day. Unfortunately his ghost writer wasn’t that great either or maybe we would have kept him ;)

[ChuckMcM]

Ha, reminds me of the guy who outsourced his own job : https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/01/16/169528579...

[pacman128]

The most infamous hire I was involved in was a guy with a long resume who had an ok technical interview on phone with me. I didn't ask him any real technical questions on the on-site visit (big mistake!). We hired him and literally knew we had made a big mistake hours into his first day. He couldn't do the simplest things (e.g., he didn't seem to grasp the difference between relative and absolute file paths, didn't know what ping was). I still don't know how he gamed the phone interview. The worst part is that management hired him as a senior developer. I could have told them he wasn't at that level, but they just looked at his years of experience on his resume. He really pissed off the junior developers as he bugged them for help on his projects.

[wink]

I remember we also did this "starter project" thing and one our new hires (who had made a really good impression in the interviews) was told to create a simple web interface for something (one of those "we should really fix this papercut") together with another hire on the frontend.

He was kinda furious that he was demoted to doing lowly web development in his first week (in order to get to know our infrastructure, in a small startup) and I don't even remember if he did a good job finishing the actual task...

[bsder]

> He was kinda furious that he was demoted to doing lowly web development in his first week

My reaction to this depends upon what you told him when you hired him.

If you hired him to do front end development, then, yeah, he's over the line.

If you tell someone that they're going to be working with the chief architect on figuring out the networking substructure and then throw him in with the web monkeys with no advance warning, they have a right to be concerned.

It also depends upon the size of the company. At a big company, I would give zero slack on this--this kind of shenanigan is indicative of a political battle and you need to hold your ground.

At a startup, I'm going to cut you slack if I see everybody is busy and you say "Look, we need you move this pile of crap. Sorry. Someone has to do it, and everyone else is busy. Interesting thing X is coming down the pipe, but right now you are two idle hands. Grab a shovel."

[wink]

Writing a Flask backend API is not front end development. No JavaScript involved. But I guess the first sentence could've used a comma. " together with another hire, with the other person on the frontend".

No, the position to be filled was supposed to be mostly Java, but it was expected and communicated everyone needs to work in the whole stack, with explicit mention of Python and Flask, just not with a heavy focus.

Also, as I said this was a task to get to know stuff, as this was kind of a dashboard thingy which would be using ~10 internal APIs. It was scoped to be a few days and explicitly mentioned that this is not the new permanent role.

And yes, we were <10 developers in the whole company.

[EdwardDiego]

Our worst hire ever had a glowing reference from his current supervisor. (the candidate stated he wanted to move from the larger corporate environment to our more relaxed environment, which is a common sentiment in people we interview)

After the slow motion train wreck that was his time with us finally departed for another station, I got talking to a guy in the local bar, who, while quite drunk, asked me "Say, you're not Edward from Company X are you?"

I told him I was, and then he promptly sprinted off to the bar, and came with a beer for me and said "I need to apologise and at least buy you this beer".

I asked him why, and it turns out it was his guilty conscience - he had been the supervisor who gave us the glowing reference for Trainwreck, and he had done it solely to get rid of Trainwreck. All the issues we'd had with him, they'd had, for longer, and in my country it's notoriously difficult to fire underperforming devs without risking penalties in an employment tribunal, how exactly do you quantify how much they are or aren't delivering?

So yeah, he lied to us to move Trainwreck out of his team. So these days I am very dubious about references from current employers/managers. And I don't quite think that the beer made up for it.

[ChuckMcM]

Ouch. I've heard of telling recruiters that a co-worker is super great in order to get them recruited out of your org but never with the glowing review.