1. He had 0 idea of coding, or why something was done - basically copy paste from github/stackoverflow and call it a day.
2. She has some basic understanding, but basically got into CS because she had heard that SE/CS Majors made "big bucks" and she thought she "knew computers"
Both graduated 4 years later, just as clueless but with degrees. When it came to interviews, both had 0 idea of the questions asked - to the point that I gave up helping them (if you can't do fizzbuzz, linked lists etc in any language or even psudocode, then you should really learn that first).
So they decided to do exactly what "Brian" did - downloaded a few of my public repos, uploaded as their own (btw it's funny because my name and email is on the README, and on almost every file - autogenerated with IntelliJ/Webstorm).
Somehow they land interviews, and both of them gets jobs at this fancy startup (making way more than me). One of them realizes that she's way over and since I was not helping, she decided to outsource it to Fiverr. She's been there 2 months and no one seems to raise any issues.
At times like this I kinda loose a bit of faith in our community - If that was what was needed, Why am I getting paid less to do more honest work? :/