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?

select * from Life where Brain is not null

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

How to get rid of charlatans?

Give them work, plenty of work and responsabilities

Steven van Els
SAvanEls@cq-link.sr

 

[syntotic]

Well, my own charlatan managed to bring down the whole company! We were developing a very promising, mass market product when he arrived. The first thing he did was to survey the political environment and throw away all the code produced by my former colleague, a mathematician with a masters degree in engineering, on the ground that her code was not good, even though we were already finishing the integration of the first working prototype. She was a little outdated in style, true, but her code was robust, almost error free and it worked as expected. However, she became the scapegoat for management, and so the charlatan's expert advise was heeded.

Suddenly management decided the java platform would not be supported due to techonology limitations (!?) and the only one to go on was the one I was starting to implement(MS). I offered to direct the new arrival on how to optimize the java code to finish integrating the prototype, and perhaps specifications could be revised, etc., but the climate was in favor of trashing six months worth of programming and blaming her for everything...

And there he was, the new arrival became my de facto boss: he would define the interfases I would implement because he would do the main component and GUI. So, the next thing he did was to change the communication protocols, threatening to invalidate my component, a kernel mode device that was a pain to install, debug and test. That's when I started smelling something rot...

I resisted change, of course, and ended up with three versions doing the same thing until the genius decided the first protocol was the right one. By the time he sent me the 18th 'final version of the idl', the first one without omissions and conforming to specifications, I had already finished the MS platform, which was the real value added application, had integrated and tested my components, had developed a GUI, implemented the version 2 features, embedded the application in IE, wrote user and developer documentation, managed to win my first solitary game and completed two small utility projects.

Then disaster hit when the main investor got married and retired to a peaceful town after the profitable but temporal market revenue came from simply ended. Meanwhile, the charlatan was still giving reasons why his component was so hard to build and how perfect was his architecture. I took to give five-minutes solutions to all his problems, yet he would take a week to find arguments to prove my solutions were not good engineering, and two more weeks to actually incorporate my solution. One year after my former colleague left he was not even ready to integrate with my components, which in themselves were product version 1.0

Finally we saw the light at the end of the tunnel when a very big corporation got interested in the product. And they called the charlatan to prepare the demo... I found this note on sunday night commanding me to get present because there were serious problems with my components, i.e., the charlatan didn't know how to install the SDK. I spent the rest of the night helping him to move the demo code to the laptop, while the rest were busy finishing a knock-you-of-the-ground site for the client. At last we integrated our code, but to the CEO's dismay it took too much time to run. Unacceptable. Since my component was the esoteric technology they all blamed me. The next day I profiled the demo and _proved_ there was a flaw in the charlatan's perfect architecture. I told our manager about it and how it could be corrected by adding a new method. Within a week _I_ was fired, but didn't matter because they paid me a lot of money to avoid getting sued... Later I was told they tried to update my code to the new MS release but it was too difficult a task for their team.

Needless to say, they didn't get the contract and the company didn't survive for long. They convinced some investors and received a 15000K capital influx, but kept the charlatan and the manager. Less than a year after I got fired the company was bought out by a big IT conglomerate and the charlatan, the manager and all his team were, er, removed. They tried to start on their own, but three months later the old office was deserted and now it's on lease. The mass market product was never released and I cannot boast of being the one responsible for it...

So, what to do when the charlatan programmer is protected by a charlatan manager? When the charlatan manager sorrounds himself with charlatans to hide his incompetence, while firing all the real programmerrs before they blow the whistle? I still don't know, but hopefully it was a once in a lifetime experience. The moral: reason against power can fail, even when calling the CEO himself.

 

[svanels]

In other words, the manager hired his gulf buddy.

Steven van Els
SAvanEls@cq-link.sr

 

[KenCunningham]

"In other words, the manager hired his gulf buddy."

Presumably only when he'd got back from Iraq? ;-)

 

[TomThumbKOP]

I don't know where I fit into the charlatan equation. I am in a position where I am required to maintain and improve several applications in several programming languages and environments. I have never had a programming class or any training at all (my degree is in physics). As a result, I have enough knowledge of several languages that I would be able to write applications in any of them (and thaks to maintaining other peoples code hopefully avoid some pitfalls). The problem is expressing this to a potential employer without turning myself into a charlatan. I don't have a piece of paper to point at and prove that I have even the basics of knowledge for any language. Yet I work everyday with programmers who have been to school for it and I have no problem keeping up. I am at a loss as to how to present myself to potential employers. Does anyone have any advice?

 

[svanels]

Just make a nice and honest resume of what you are actually doing. Programming is not just sitting behind a computer and hack some code. My degree is in Mechanical Engineering and programming is just an interesting part of problem solving.
My father is an electrician, but that doesn't mean that I am good in electricity.

Steven van Els
SAvanEls@cq-link.sr

 

[BJCooperIT]

My thoughts are that if you can do the work then you are not a charlatan. For some folks even a certificate or a diploma is not an insurance policy that guarantees their skills. Accomplishments speak volumes so focus on them with potential employers.

[sup]Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.[/sup][sup] ~George Bernard Shaw[/sup]
Consultant/Custom Forms & PL/SQL - Oracle 8.1.7 - Windows 2000

 

[MDXer]

TomThumbKOP

Not having the degree in in Computer Science or taken any programming classes, in my experience has proven to be not an issue. On my resume I list my skills how long I have worked with each technology or language, and what language / technology I am currently developing as part of my job responsibilities. Sometimes it does take a bit of sales on my part to get the interview or the job but once I am able to demonstrate my skillset to my potential employeer I do so. I have risen from Customer Support to Business Intelligence and Olap Consultant. In less than 6 years, and have worked with a few prominent people in the olap community.

"Shoot Me! Shoot Me NOW!!!"
- Daffy Duck

 

[InnoTech]

I'm not understanding. I've been in IT for years (only 5), but never a programmer or the such. However, I have never worked with one person that had a degree or cert in the tech field that has been worth minimum wage. Yes, I went to tech school and got my crappy MCSE, but never used it until 3 years later after I learned how networks worked.

You ONLY know things after you do them. There is nothing on paper that would help me to hire someone except work experience.

And for the charlatans, they're everywhere and there is nothing anyone can do about it. Even if you followed up on the resume, all you could check out was the time employeed, position and if availible for rehire. Anything else unethical and in most states, illegal.



"Jack of all trades. Master of none."

 

[svanels]

There are a lot of things you can do about charlatans, (unless they are shoved in from above). Interviews help a lot, but you need a team of qualified people with different backgounds, not only techs, there is also a thing they call HR.
Don't focus only on certificates.
Things like social life, hobbies etc. also counts, that way you can make a profile of the person in question.

It is true that you will realy know the person after some time, but it isn't always a shot in the dark.

Steven van Els
SAvanEls@cq-link.sr

 

[flapeyre]

TomThumbKOP:
I don't have a degree in anything (2+ years of college and another year at a vo-tech school, where I learned programming), or certifications of any kind in the IT industry. What counts is not the certifications (you can pass those tests without having made one cent in the industry - I have an FCC General Radiotelephone Operator License, which enables me to legally operate any radio or TV station in the USA - not that I know how to, anymore!). I can tell you from memory what the color burst subcarrier frequency for the NTSC TV standard is (for the curious, it's 3.579545 MHz), but I'm not the guy you want to fix the transmitter when lightning strikes the tower. And even I have problems programming my VCR. Fortunately, I discovered my niche - RPG programming on the IBM AS/400 (or i-Series, as they call it these days).

Your past accomplishments in your chosen field are the measure you should be judged by. Nothing succeeds like success.


"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