(1) The candidate was a criminal mastermind who somehow managed to fool everyone for 15 years.
(2) The candidate was just super nervous during the interview and experienced a kind of test anxiety.
I've personally been (2) several times.
Not "criminal mastermind", but do enough hiring and you will run into a lot of people who are convincing conversationalists but clearly haven't written much code in a very long time.
In a couple cases I gave these people benefit of the doubt and gave them a backup take-home problem (super trivial, 5 minutes for experienced engineers). They always came back with a solution, but when you asked them to walk you through it they couldn't really tell you what they wrote.
I understand that test anxiety is real, but having to discuss your code with others on the spot is also part of the job. If someone can't discuss even the most basic fundamentals of programming in a conversation, you can't dismiss it all as anxiety every time.
IMO the key is really to investigate the candidates as much as possible before they even walk in the door. Nowadays, many candidates have a large public footprint.
(I also think employers interview way too many people. That's mostly a waste of time, better spent focusing on a relatively small number of the top candidates.)
I'm sure we all have stories about falling on our faces during a technical evaluation, it sucks but I wouldn't personally fault the interviewers passing on them.
Software developer hiring is very different from most other hiring, but it seems that many software developers don't even realize how eccentric they are, because they've never been outside their own industry.
Please note I'm not saying ask leetcode questions, I can't even solve LC. I've failed many interviews at Facebook and Amazon because of LC; but other jobs I've accepted all asked some basic coding questions.
- It's definitely possible to hold a tech job for 12-18 months without writing any working code and changing jobs that often isn't that big of a red flag. Also, people lie about their experience.
- The pool of people applying for a job has a very low intersection with the pool of people currently working at a job. In that intersection there is a very high subset of people who believe they may lose their job soon. Therefore the people applying to a job is largely people who either are not currently working, or will shortly be out of work. See also[1]
1: http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/03/thank-you-for-writing-su...
Which big firms?
I find it curious that a BigCo on one's résumé brings cachet, because BigCos are able to hide incompetence, even at the executive level, to a vastly greater extent than a small company. If you find someone who for example has around a decade of experience at a company of around ten people, it's going to be almost impossible for that person to have done nothing of value.
> These kinds of candidates outnumbered the obviously anxious candidates by maybe 10 to 1.
Anxiousness is not necessarily obvious. My stomach could be churning and my mind racing, but a stranger probably wouldn't be able to tell.
As for which companies? Basically any large enterprise except absolute top-tier tech. I wouldn’t necessarily call such people incomponent though - I’m sure they were perfectly good button-pushers within the corporate machine. Low-skill high-specificity.
IME these people talk a lot of talk, but they don't deliver contributions. Like the simplest script could take a quarter? I don't endorse code metrics, but, e.g., 1 PR / quarter (of really simple stuff), unless that PR is blowing my socks off or had some complex amount of research or some reason behind it, is underperforming.
You expect negative returns for a new employee like the first 6–12 months. This is well after that, where it's clear that they're not putting in the effort to understand the systems around them, or they lack fundamental skills (like experience writing actual code), or more often, both.
This person had a very very niche job, at two orgs, with no work/growth outside of that very specific thing. This lack of doing anything else was a flag one of the high level managers saw.
