[karaterobot]

I don't know if that's true. I'm not saying software engineers don't fake it, but I think many doctors and lawyers are faking it, too, if we're defining faking it as looking up information, or even assisting with your core job responsibilities. I don't consider that faking it, but I think that's what we're talking about, isn't it?

One time I asked my optometrist what he was doing when he left me in the examination room for 15 minutes. He said he was looking up the details of the medicine he was going to prescribe me. I don't consider that incompetence, and it sounds a lot like what I do when I need to know about some technical issue. Everybody in my industry knows that Googling stuff is a huge part of the job, but you're not allowed to acknowledge that in an interview.

I think it is actually an interesting and relevant question: why don't past performance or job references play more of a role in hiring, compared to technical screens many people hate and think are pointless? Checking references and former calling employers—if it's done at all—is often a pro forma final step, rather than the first step, which might plausibly be a more effective way to screen candidates.

[NegativeK]

I don't think that's faking it at all. Being able to research is part of any knowledge based profession.

Faking it is shirking your duties. Most bad medicine doesn't result in obvious harm/cost to a patient or a board complaint. A poorly managed medical practice that runs off support staff and makes patients wait three hours isn't going to threaten a license, and that's faking practice management. A primary care doctor who punts anything beyond the very, very basics to third party vendors or specialists is faking it.

In my major metropolitan area, general practice veterinarians are often absolute crap at doing their (required) medical notes. If you ask them for copies, they'll send you invoices. If you push for real notes, they'll use their 48 hour response window to make something up. They almost always get away with it because during future visits, the vet (whether it's the same person or not) will ask a bunch of questions to (necessarily) fake knowing what was done previously. It's obviously going to affect patient care and cost, and if you look at board complaints that aren't thrown out, the "punishment" is usually because the board saw that the vet has shit for notes. And don't even get me started on vets using AI, which results in hallucinations in the notes -- which I think are notably worse for patient care than just empty notes.

I think that's a good example of even good doctors faking it.

[toast0]

Being able to do the work with reference materials is fine. Maybe if you spend all day on stack overflow asking questions and waiting for answers, not that great. But it depends on the level of work; for me, a lot of my real work problems either have no search results or lead to only reports of questions with no answers. Formal documentation is typically absent, although sometimes there's insufficient or misleading documentation instead. Someone who can't figure things out in these conditions wouldn't be able to do my job.

In my mind, faking it is learning what to say in interviews to get the job(s) without having the skills and ability to do the work.

That said, when I interview, I'm really looking for can they describe the output of a program before the write the program, and then can they write the program that works as they said it would. Also, the program should have a loop inside a loop, because nested loops happen all the time and there are too many candidates that can't deal with them.

Candidates that can't manage a nested loop or can't write a program that does what they said it would immediately prior to starting to write the program but somehow managed to get into my interview are faking it in my book. Some candidates clearly are just having a bad day, and some are probably having a bad day but not as clearly.

References are hard because a) some people fake those b) fear of litigation means many companies prefer to only provide start and end dates and maybe eligibility for rehire. Also, the modern world means nobody answers their phone so this process becomes very asynchronous.