>One was so bad that they had no idea what a variable was.
I'm curious as to how someone like that could even pass a phone interview. Even if they were cheating, they would have had to have been reading stuff verbatim to answer the interviewer's questions. How was this not at least picked up a little bit during the interview? How could someone with such a small amount of knowledge in the domain trick the interviewer enough that they raised no flags at all during the interview?