What do you do with a charlatan? 2

[BJCooperIT]

Recently in these threads professional incompetentency has been discussed at length. This question addresses something a bit different. Have you ever worked with an IT charlatan?

YourDictionary.com: charlatan
"A person who makes elaborate, fraudulent, and often voluble claims to skill or knowledge; a quack or fraud."

Many years ago the company I worked for hired a "real hot shot", in the manager's words, who was going to "get things on the right track". Having only been in the business for 3 years I was in awe of this fellow. He used to drop by my office talk about things like writing a program to count noise bytes on magnetic tapes. To be frank, I had no idea what he was talking about. I thought that technically he was so far beyond me that I was lost.

After 2 months he suddenly disappeared from the office. Finally the project leader admitted that this guy had been quietly fired because it had become increasingly obvious that he was a fake. Apparently he was able to throw the right terms around well enough to get hired but was always found out by the end of a couple of months. He had been doing this for three years and none of his previous employers would give him a bad reference because having hired a fake would reflect badly on their company. I would have thought changing jobs so frequently would have been a giant red flag but apparently he was able to talk his way around that too!

Charlatans - How do you spot them? How do you deal with them? Do you report them or let them self-destruct?

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Consultant/Custom Forms & PL/SQL - Oracle 8.1.7 - Windows 2000
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[flapeyre]

People are changing jobs more and more frequently these days (especially in IT), so his apparent lack of job stability would not necessarily raise a red flag.

The longest period I have even been employed by one employer was 9 years and 2 months (that was not an IT job, though). I have been at this company, in IT, for almost 7 years. However, before I settled down over here, I was employed in IT for 4 months (the company was closing, and we all knew it), then about a year each in 2 different jobs, and now, here I am.

This guy sounds like a real leach, and if asked, the company(s) who had the misfortune of having him on the payroll should be honest about his past performance (or lack thereof) with any prospective employer of his who asks. And, as a general rule everyone should ask for references and follow up on them. Had this been done, his application would probably have been File 13'd without further ado.

On the other hand, I'll bet he conveniently sugared up the "reason for leaving last employer" parts on his application, and they took it at face value.


"When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the Earth with your eyes turned skyward, for here you have been, and there you will always long to return."

--Leonardo da Vinci

 

[palbano]

>> How do you spot them?

During the candidate phase?

If they are programmers, ask them to write some code or ask them simple language based questions. I have had no problem weeding out programmers in telephone screens and interviews.

I have a collection of questions for languages where they are ranked from 1 to 10. For each language a candidate reports experience I have them rank themselves 1 to 10. Then I have questions for that ranking and below and I ask them. This technique makes it simple to find out the actual experience, according to my ranking, and to get a glimpse of the candidate’s self-evaluation capability.

If they are already hired before you talk with them the same approach applies by asking them to assist in solving a design or coding problem with your current project. You just assume they would rank themselves a 10 and ask them to help with a complex problem. That should do it.

>> How do you deal with them?
>> Do you report them or let them self-destruct?

Those questions have more to do with your environment, particularly the political one. If you have a voice in the department then should consider using it. If you don’t, then you should try and insulate your self from the Sh_t when it hits the fan.

Do you have one (charlatan) currently? Are you being forced to work with it? If so in what capacity?

-pete

 

[BJCooperIT]

Nowadays I deal more with incompetent or inexperienced co-workers than charlatans. I am curious whether charlatans can still exist in today's technology. I suspect if they are well-versed in the buzzwords of a very specialized talent that they might still be out there. If there is no one in-house who can ask the right questions or if no one follows up on references they just might get in the door.

If I can talk a good game about Oracle Clinicals and a company wants to implement it (without any in-house expertise) I just might be able to B.S. my way into that job. Who would really know until I missed my first deadline?

select * from Life where Brain is not null

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[dilettante]

A related type is the "hack." They can do enough to get by, eventually even get most things working after leaning on everyone else in the office and going way over their time budget, but nobody ever wants to work on their code.

Often the hack will refuse to do what the user wants, claiming it is &quot;impossible.&quot; Then somebody else quietly gets asked to intervene by showing that it CAN be done (w/o hurting the hack's feelings of course), the hack pees on it to make it his own, and the &quot;mentor&quot; gets no credit but the <sarcasm>satisfaction</sarcasm> of subsidizing yet another hack.

 

[DonQuichote]

dilettante,

That is so recognisable. You teach that person how certain things must be done (departemental programming policy) and even after two years they still refuse to do it, pretending never to have heard of it. You only explained it in detail some 30 times...

BJCooperIT,

We had a kind of charlatan around our department as well. Was supposedly good and experienced in Java and knew Visual Basic. I still can't grasp how he could get so much &quot;experience&quot; in java and know so little about it. It turned out that he did some courses in languages, but fundamentals in programming and abstract thinking were a big problem. We tried to educate him during half a year, but did not prolongate his contract when this did not work.

Best regards

 

[DSMARWAY]

hi ,

I knew this guy , who did his degree in economics and due to job climate he opted for a career in IT ( He got the job , i don't know how probably very good interview technique) , however on his first day at work ( this is what he told me ) , he didn't even know how to turn on the computer , he asked the cleaner - True , and now he is a senior Visual C ++ programmer. I believe it depends who the person , if they are keen and willing give them the chance , but the charlatans, you can spot because anything you mention , they'll turn round and say , yes i know , yes i heard of that , or yes I've done that before .

laters

 

[CajunCenturion]

[n]DonQuichote[/n] - I like your phrase, &quot;It turned out that he did some courses in languages, but fundamentals in programming and abstract thinking were a big problem.&quot;

To me, that is the crux of the issue of a certification vs an accredited university degree.

Good Luck
--------------
As a circle of light increases so does the circumference of darkness around it. - Albert Einstein

 

[Rhys666]

Interesting thread, very for me as I'm assuming most of these posts are not UK based as I am. From my perpspective, and it's only an opinion, certification and degree's can both be highly over-rated as benchmarks for ability, the thing that demonstrates ability best is showing it, that and a willingness to be honest about what you and to learn what you don't.
I have no formal IT qualifications, and my employer couldn't even be described as unwilling to provide formal training, they are that short sighted at times. I moved into System Testing some 5 years ago, and due to a company re-organisation, (no more system testing!), was moved to a VB 6/SQL server programming Support role not long after. In the 4 years since I've less than 28 days formal training but have learn't from MSDN, Books, Forums, willing colleagues and any other source I could. I'm now the sole person in my department of the company I'm working for now doing .Net development, but how do I demonstrate my ability to do a job without demonstarting it?
Charlatans, hacks, I've met people I could describe as both and I don't believe I would be described as one, but how do you get past the barrier that often these people have better interview techniques and a lack of formal training and qualification makes it harder to get an interview, and strangely more nervous if they get offered...

Rhys
Thought out... Maybe,
Opinionated... Probably
But iit is only an opiniion!

 

[dilettante]

I suspect most people making hiring decisions are really looking for someone like themselves.

If you got interviewed by somebody actually near the trenches doing the work, a true representation of your skills will make the best impression as long as they are truly aligned with the duties of the new position. If you are interviewed by Mr. Gladhand Golfereenie you'd better come off as a good old boy clubman. Then there are the paper/process lovers, so you emphasize your background in meta-activities like progress reports, documentation, UML diagrams, adherance to procedure, vaugeness about Quality with a capital Q, and general corporate BS.

The trick is being prepared for the different personality types, and quickly figuring out which you are dealing with. Quite a challenge.

 

[TomKane]

I once came into contact with a guy who was branded a charlatan - but I think he got a bit of a raw deal.

What happened was the company I was working for at the time were looking for a &quot;guru&quot; type - someone who had experience in networks, o/s and programming and a good instinct for IT generally. (a guy like cajuncenturion I suppose).

Based purely on the strength of his CV alone this guy (I'll call him Jim) got the job. This caused bad feeling with one particular developer who, whenever there was a difficult problem to resolve, would say, &quot;Oh, I can't wait for superman to get here - he'll sort all this out&quot;

Now Jim had skills, probably not as many as he had let on and was particularly lacking in experience in a software package that was pretty major in our organisations operation - I think he'd worked in an organisation that had used it but that was about it.

Whenever issues would arise this developer would always make a point of exposing Jim's lack of knowledge in this and would be always &quot;rubbishing&quot; him behind his back to just about everone (including passers by in the street for all I know).

As it turned out he was pretty hot with Netware (this is about 7 yrs ago btw) and brought a server back from the dead one time - much to everyone's relief (particularly mine). On the other hand he wasn't so hot with unix and spent a fornight fixing a problem that should have taken a half day. He was also a decent programmer. He didn't have knowledge of the s/w package I mentioned earler but he introduced our organisation to a couple of customers who needed support of it.

I think the problem was that he had set himself up as a guru and felt he couldn't ask for help particularly with this developer waiting to pounce at every opportunity.

In the end he was fired - not because of his skills - but he was a scape goat for a project that went a bit wrong (lack of sales - not a technical or functional problem). When he was gone the developer I was talking about before remarked, &quot;Jim's gone? Pity, he was a nice fellow&quot;.

The thing about it for me is that I will never, ever put anything on my cv that I can't back up because there is no way I would ever put myself through that stuff Jim went through.

 

[Chopstik]

I saw the title of this thread and was immediately intrigued, not the least because I spent a very frustrating 18 months with a charlatan in my previous corporate life. I sort of fell into IT from business accounting and my first real IT position was a &quot;programmer&quot; with a systems group. I was hired internally along with another &quot;programmer&quot; from outside at about the same time. I was hired because the manager knew what I was capable of from my previous department and wanted to give me a chance to learn and develop more. The external hire was hired because of his vaunted expertise in Access (which was the one thing he DID know), VB and web development technologies. I was told that he would be my lead and that I could learn whatever I needed to from him.

However, I was continually frustrated in trying to do things because whenever I had questions on VB apps that I was trying to develop, I would be continually rebuffed by my &quot;lead&quot; because he was too busy (surfing the net, downloading music and a few other unmentionables)! It wasn't until I was working on converting a Dynacomm script (which I had also been forced to learn in order to maintain) into a more user-friendly, not to mention more stable, VB app and was peppering him with questions that he actually admitted to me that he did not know VB and that he was distracted by my questions for him on the subject (and would I please stop!). Found out later that he did not know any web technology either - other than the lingo to make it sound like he did.

I kept it to myself for a while, until our new manager (due to a restructuring) assigned the two of us to the same project - previously, we had been working separate projects. I then called him privately and expressed my reservations about working with my &quot;lead&quot; and the fact that his knowledge was lacking. By that point - and I should clarify that I am no &quot;expert&quot; programmer by any stretch of the imagination - I was the lead as far as the groups we supported and I informed my manager of such. He sympathized with me and then said he would take care of it. Nothing happened. Eventually, I was given new projects and new things to do and my &quot;lead&quot; was allowed to hang around doing nothing. I worked 60-70 hour weeks and he appropriated credit when it suited him. When people needed things fixed or done, they came to me. While my supported groups knew who did the work, management could not be bothered. All that, and I earned almost half of his salary (because he was the &quot;experienced&quot; one and I was the &quot;trainee&quot!!!

The only good things to come out of this is that everyone got what was coming to them in the end. I got the opportunities to learn new technologies, learn project management, and become more comfortable in a semi-autonomous/management role. In the end, I left that company for my current position which has continued to allow me to grow and develop, not to mention a much more reasonable salary. My former &quot;lead&quot; was subsequently demoted to a first-level help desk position (as mgmt apparently quickly discovered that the work was no longer being done after I left) that he still could not handle (!) and eventually ended up being laid off. Last I heard of him, he is doing contract and consulting work (on whatever he is claiming on his cv these days).

Sorry to vent, it just came out...

Everything is absolute. Everything else is relative.

 

[AnanthaP]

To answer the basic questions:
How do you spot them?
They miss deadlines consistently dont they? The end user says &quot;This is not what I expected.&quot;.

How do you deal with them?
Ensure that your hiring agency (or department) has a probationary period.

Do you report them or let them self-destruct?
Self destruct is messy. They may take the project down with them.

end

 

[Tarwn]

The problem with using missed dealines and the end users comments to judge a perons as a charlatan is pretty abvious from my stdnpoint, though I wish it worked as well as it should. I have a particular customer that, with a 1 month budget deadline on the horizon, continued to try to add functionality to a project all the way up to the last day of the year. Since I am not the boss, I could only tell my boss that this was a bad isea, to no avail. This left the cutomer feeling that he did not get what he expected because there was not time to test, let alone start two aspects of the project he had added in the last week of the period. He extended the period a further two weeks, cutting into his next years budget, blaming the mess on me, who could of course only take it.

By the definition above I would be a charlatan because I had said that I would finish the project by the end of the year (two months before the end of budget). I did add the exclusion of &quot;as long as nothing else gets added&quot; but people tend to ignore things like that. The customer obviously felt that we were not providing him what he expected despite the fact that we not only completed what we originally contracted but most of the additions as well. (The additions being stand alone apps, the project actually consisted of a large group of small apps).

This same customer has since insulted me in a private email because of an install that went awry. In this case my only responsibility was to get a piece of software installed, configured, and on a Solaris system. There was another contractor there working on the system my software was interfacing too. Unfortunatly he hadn't touched Unix in a while and kept typing &quot;ipconfig&quot; until I pointed out that that was a valid command. A 30 minute configuration cost them 17 hours of my time. The system was running before the power surge went through the not-recently-tested surge protector and ate the other contractors program. I left when it became evident that the system would not be restored for at least a day.

The email came a week later when my software failed to restart during a system boot. Things like waste of time and money, inadequate testing, etc were mentioned. I logged in remotely, added two lines of code to .cshrc file that had somehow reverted back to a copy from '99, and had the system running again in a few minutes. I checked the system state and realized the other contractor had done a partial reinstall. Though I mentioned this to the customer, somehow I was still to blame.


I apologize for the long windedness of this post, but do have a point.

Anyone can be made to look like a charlatan. In some cases it is accidental, but in some cases it is a purposeful misrepresentation in order to seek free work. In both cases above the employer later contacted my boss and &quot;explained&quot; the situation. In both cases he got free work from our company at a later point to make up for our &quot;errors&quot;.

-Tarwn

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[punisher5555]

My 2 cents:

I think in my line of work &quot;Network Engineer&quot; the worst fear is being branded a &quot;charlatan&quot;. It is already hard to find a job in this time and age. And there are millions of people who do networking/administration.

Being branded could be intentional or by accident. Somebody doesn't like you and talks behind your back. Somebody is jealous of your position/salary. Projects get behind at no fault of yours or your team. Some people just do not like to be told &quot;NO, it can't work that way. It has to be done this way.&quot; It could go on and on.

Having 10 years experience and a Degree in Networking with some certs I always hope that I will not be branded.

Is it this way with programmers? I think with networking people it is. They always says Network Engineers/Administrator are a dime-a-dozen you could easily be replaced inadvertatly or intentionally by being branded.

 

[Tarwn]

I'm not sure, the problem is a little different. Network Engineers/Administrators have a tangible product they are working on, so when it doesn't work and you have to replace a piece of hardware, generally anyone can understand the concept &quot;the wire is bad, I fix&quot; (or something similar) as it applies to tangible objects. When it comes to software development people(ie management, customers, etc) are already nervous because there is nothing tangible for them to look at, so when it breaks they first have to deal with the fact that they have no understanding of the breakage, physical objects break while software is only an idea, and therefore have difficulty scaling the severity of the breakage and deciding whether it is a faulty developer or simply part of the process.

-Tarwn

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[RiverGuy]

DSMARWAY,

Going from not knowing how to turn on a PC to being a senior C++ programmer--that's one of the most bizzarre stories I've ever heard. At least the guy seems like he worked hard instead of just trying to ride out the wave of no knowledge.

 

[Alt255]

I am learning a great deal from the charlatan who took over my department last year. We were having quality issues and problems meeting schedule. Morale was dropping through the floor. This guy doubled the size of the department (staffing from the ranks of recent college grads), purchased new hardware and extended our lunch breaks to one hour. Most of our worst problems were eliminated within a matter of months. The clients are happy, top management is ecstatic and, over all, the quality of our workplace has increased by 300%.

I had been awestruck during my first meeting with my new boss. His knowledge seemed almost godly. But I started to doubt my own sanity within a week. Having expelled his entire repertoire of buzz words my boss started to divert attention from himself with artful delegation. Whenever I went to him with a problem he would wave his arms over the pile of work on his desk, tell me to research the problem, find a solution and then let him know how I handled the problem... ASAP. This kept me busy enough to miss the obvious: he was delegating every task to myself or one of the junior members of the staff. The illusion of competence was so complete and convincing that nobody realized what was happening until the magic had taken effect and our department was operating at an enhanced level of efficiency.

Yes, by now, most of us understand that he is a charlatan. Aside from an ability to regurgitate memorized buzz words on demand, an uncanny sense of protocol and an almost supernatural ability to be in the right place at the right time, this guy shouldn't even be employed. He doesn't possess even a basic understanding of the most basic concepts of the business. Which is fine... as long as he stays in his office and doesn't make one of his rare attempts to get directly involved with the work....

Last week he engaged me in a bit of idle chit-chat about my current project. I watched my language, careful to keep the content non-technical... but I managed to slip. I muttered something about checking the length of a string.

My boss said, &quot;I'll be right back,&quot; ran into his office and trotted out with a metric ruler.

I gently shook my head and whispered, &quot;Our bytes are measured in inches.&quot; He nodded, acknowledging that the content of the conversation would be &quot;our little secret.&quot;

Yes, this actually happened.

Think about it: the clients are happy, the top brass is happy and the employees are happy. Why would anybody want to rock the boat?

Real men don't use Interrupt 21h.​

 

[carp]

Absolutely.
Of course, the Titanic was shiny, new, beautiful, the crew was happy, the passengers were happy, and she was making record time. Why would you want to change anything because there might be a few icebergs in the ocean?!

 

[TheVampire]

Alt255,

You should send the part about the string and ruler to the Sharktank at computerworld.com

I'm sure he'd print it, and you'll get a cool t-shirt!

Robert