1) He was on another team the first 6-7 months of that. He was transferred to me on account of previous project being wrong area for him (it required domain knowledge he didn't have and didn't pick up). His former manager had worked with him before, so we gave him benefit of the doubt. After a few weeks of ramp-up on my team, he started giving me productive progress updates throughout every week. "I spent all week debugging such-and-such. I spent half the week helping Joe debug a problem", etc. He was very nice and external signs were fine. Then I saw his actual code was minimal, and sadly I learned that the engineers he kept telling me he was busy helping (which would be super valuable work) weren't actually getting that help -- he'd occasionally answer a question, or spend 15 minutes looking over someone's shoulder.
2) A guy on my team is repeatedly telling me he's on the verge of solving a tough problem, and then I take a look at his code and discover it was a trivial issue all along. No, the answer was not that I should have jumped in earlier and taken over the bug myself.
His story ended by being put on a performance plan, which he failed, and then we let him go. At the end of the day, though, he could very likely have stayed with us, if he just accepted my feedback that his productivity was far lower where it should be, and lower than all his peers. He refused to hear it. "You can't measure my performance based on LOC!" Correct, but the LOC was the first clue that he was delivering nearly zero value.
The reason I even told this story to begin with was because some developers somehow tell themselves that they're super productive despite barely checking in any code. By and large, that can't be true.