I once interviewed a "senior engineer" who was nearly twice my age. I was very intimidated; his resume indicated that he should be the one interviewing me, not the other way around.
We chatted for a while, and I felt really good about him. However, I had a gut feeling I should just check to make sure he could do the equivalent of fizz buzz. I said something like "Sorry for this formality, I know it might be seen as an insult to your experience... could we do a bit of coding?" His resume indicated nearly twice as many years of C++ experience than me.
I took out my laptop and produced three function signatures - one passing by reference, one passing by pointer, and one passing a pointer by reference. I asked him to explain the difference between the three. With a completely straight face and unshakable confidence he replied "no difference, they are all three ways of doing the same thing". I asked some clarifying questions, trying to probe the difference between pass-by-reference and pass-by-pointer. Again, he answered extremely confidently and coolly (but incorrectly).
"Err, no." I replied. "This ampersand here is a pass by reference, which means c++ handles the referencing and dereferencing of the pointer automatically. It's much safer than the other two, where you are ultimately dealing with a raw pointer and need to check for null pointers before dereferencing". Immediately he broke out into an uncontrollable sweat; it was really remarkable. Before asking the technical questions, I felt really good about him. I wonder how many companies he has fooled.
At this point everyone knows he's a fake. He's not involved in anything technical despite being a "senior dev". It was quite uncomfortable when he was programming and we had to review his code but at this point he's just hanging out in the office and sitting in on meetings.
I wonder about his psychological state. He doesn't seem happy.
It's a story I've been told. Candidate is being interviewed for a senior position, there are three employees conducting the interview: one HR rep, one (non-technical) manager and one senior engineer.
The engineer supposed to help with the interview arrived late so the HR rep and manager briefed him, basically telling him the interview was going well and that they were considering hiring him unless he had any objections.
Going back, he asked the candidate a simple Fizz Buzz question, something like finding the largest element in an array. All hell broke loose suddenly. He was outraged and started telling them that, back in his country he was a university professor and that this was beneath him. The interview ended with the candidate arguing for 10 minutes that he shouldn't have to do this test. If I recall, at this point the senior engineer just left the room and didn't bother with the remaining 15 minutes of the interview.
Needless to say they didn't hire him. HR was shocked as he seemed to be a great hire.
Fast forward a few years later, I'm the one interviewing and I systematically get great resumes who can't implement a simple version of word count in 30 minutes.
We chatted for a while, and I felt really good about him. However, I had a gut feeling I should just check to make sure he could do the equivalent of fizz buzz. I said something like "Sorry for this formality, I know it might be seen as an insult to your experience... could we do a bit of coding?" His resume indicated nearly twice as many years of C++ experience than me.
I took out my laptop and produced three function signatures - one passing by reference, one passing by pointer, and one passing a pointer by reference. I asked him to explain the difference between the three. With a completely straight face and unshakable confidence he replied "no difference, they are all three ways of doing the same thing". I asked some clarifying questions, trying to probe the difference between pass-by-reference and pass-by-pointer. Again, he answered extremely confidently and coolly (but incorrectly).
"Err, no." I replied. "This ampersand here is a pass by reference, which means c++ handles the referencing and dereferencing of the pointer automatically. It's much safer than the other two, where you are ultimately dealing with a raw pointer and need to check for null pointers before dereferencing". Immediately he broke out into an uncontrollable sweat; it was really remarkable. Before asking the technical questions, I felt really good about him. I wonder how many companies he has fooled.