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I know this story.
Fake it till you make it is one possible reason.
The other... A typical case "I'm so smart I don't have to work like a peasant. The peasants should worship me instead".
Both versions end sooner or later getting fired, cause upper management doesn't like getting fooled.
Or blackmailed, another thing that can backfire very quickly. -
You just explained my previous team lead. He used brag this and that and was quite good at fending off clients dumb and unnecessary requirements and was quite good at defending us from any trouble. We only knew he didn't write a single line of productive code after he left the company. We had to fix his shit for months after he left. Fake it till you make it, gotta admit he was quite good at it.
Found this in our codebase, apparently one of my co-workers had written this
So I worked with this guy for 2 years. Lets call him Fred. He came into the company and immediately inserted himself as a programmer lead. I asked him to talk to our boss to determine if he was in fact in charge of the devs now. Our boss said he is not in charge of anything. He continued to act like a lead. I was like fine, "you can play boss for now". He was actually very helpful to bounce ideas off of and knew a lot about programming in general. I enjoyed working with him.
Fast forward 2 years after he was hired. I come into work and notice he isn't at work. I figure he was taking a longer vacation. It was around thanksgiving. A week goes by. I ask another coworker where Fred is. Coworker, "Oh, he was let go." Apparently there was a conflict with our boss with Fred. The boss had to work the weekend to write a bunch of code Fred was supposed to write.
So I got paranoid and wondering if I was going to get fired. I didn't understand the specifics of why and nobody was explaining this. I had planned on working on some extra code for another coworker, but decided against this due to the recent events. I just kept working the task I was assigned, but I kind of got depressed about this. This hurt my productivity for a month or two.
A few months go by. I talk to the coworker about Fred. The coworker explains that Fred never actually generated any code that was usable. Some of the code this coworker had to fix. So the sum total of code was actually a negative amount of lines written while working here.
How the fuck do you stay employed without writing code as a developer? The guy was smart, and understood math way better than I understand it. How can Fred seem like he knows what he is doing, but not produce anything? This would embarrass me to be this unproductive. I don't think the guy was incompetent. He always contributed guidance and helped keep projects on task. My coworker thinks Fred was trying to be a manager instead of a developer. Why not balance that and be both? I get sick of coding at times and would love to just talk to people.
I am very confused how Fred fucked up a pretty laid back dev job.
rant
wtf