[uyt]

> I do know of two cases of "fake programmers" (...) the person was able to sneak under the radar at Google for multiple years before someone realized that the person never actually wrote any code and tasks only got completed when they got someone else to do the task. The person who realized eventually scheduled a pair programming session, where they discovered that the person wasn't able to write a loop, didn't know the difference between = and ==, etc., despite being a "senior SWE" (L5/T5) at Google for years.

I thought this only happens in tv shows. Was it more like Big Head from HBO Silicon Valley (the company forgot about the employee) or Frank Abagnale from Catch Me If You Can (conman who managed to fake his identity and credentials)?

[specialist]

I've seen this. Decades later, I still don't know how it happened.

Civil engineering company hired CAD savvy engineer. A rarity back then. Jared. Then sent him to advanced training. Before his first day in office. Then bought him the best gear, including extra monitor and custom desk. Which caused a little bit of resentment, of course. (New hires generally got hand me downs.)

Second day on the job. Yay, welcome to the team. Jared got his machine booted. Pulled up a drawing. Stared at the screen for a while. Then he asked me how to draw a line.

Smart ass me: "Ell eye n e, then hit enter."

Jared presses the keys, repeating the letters out loud, hits enter. Then says "LINE. Oh."

The rest of the drafters and engineers looked up, unbelieving.

Jared was also adept at sloughing his workload and tasks onto others.

I'm now remembering some other Jared stories.

Jared tells me his machine is broken. He kept erasing a line. And when he did 'refresh', the line was still there. Of course I debug. Turns out Jared had made dozens of copies of his entire design, in exactly the same location. So he was just erasing the top instance, one at at time.

Remember acoustic ceiling tile? Jared was adept at flicking pencils up so they'd stick in the ceiling, like darts. One of his hobbies. He'd lay multiple pencils flat in his hand. Then kinda slapped that arm against the other hand. Jared proudly claimed his personal record was something like 4 pencils at once (successfully stuck in the ceiling).

Remember when GIS systems were the new hotness? Jared scored a job at the county, becoming the director of GIS systems. I'm sure if any actual work happened during his reign, it was accidental. Our tax dollars hard at work.

[SergeAx]

Big Head from "Silicon Valley" actually coded a working MVP of Nip Alert.

[temikus]

Worked at Google. Wouldn’t doubt this story for a second. Met a ton of amazing people at google but also some _very_ interesting characters. Ratio of good-to-questionable has been pretty good though, so can’t complain.

[mettamage]

How do you get past the interview stage if you don't know the difference between = and ==?

Leetcode problems require you to know that.

[smorgusofborg]

Google seems to limit people to testing in a few similar abstracted assembly languages, but they buy out startups which might be using languages that discourage these simple loops, reassignments, etc that "every programmer uses".

So quite possibly this was a perfectly good architect/programmer from a successful product who was turned into a C++ engineer on paper but never actually accepted the new role and only continued to architect.