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Comment by pianoben | Hacker News Reader

My memory is a little fuzzy, but back in 2012 or so, this programming whiz applied for a job at Square on the security team (I think?). He was impressive, and had written an SSL implementation (EDIT: it was actually a certificate authority) entirely in Ruby. Breezed through the coding challenges. Just our luck that one of the interviewers was the actual author of that implementation!

Seriously, it was really just luck. It makes me wonder how many people successfully bluff their way through their careers.

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Reminds me of when the MIT admissions dean was found to have faked her degrees: https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2019/05/15/mit-dean-for...

Marilee Jones (that article is subscriberwalled). "...and co-author of the popular guide to the college admission process 'Less Stress, More Success: A New Approach to Guiding Your Teen Through College Admissions and Beyond' (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2006)"(!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilee_Jones

Interestingly it's really easy to fake degrees because the universities are prohibited by law from sharing information on students.

Universities have a process for providing proof of degrees as long as the student authorizes it. Thing is when you're in mid-late career, no employer cares.

You could have just asked: "what's wrong with SSL?" and anybody who ever wrote actual SSL / X509 / CA related code would not stop talking :)

My go-to Android interview question for years was simply, "Tell me your pain". A developer with any experience would be overflowing with angst about the platform and it was a really good way to gauge their ability.

Did that applicant claim to be the original author of that implementation? I don't see why it would be an issue otherwise...

Yes, that's exactly what they did and why it was a problem. They represented themselves as the sole author. I want to say that they'd never even sent in a single PR, but this was over 10 years ago and I just heard the story over lunch (the real author told us all about it).

Seriously? You think that if people insinuate plagiarized stuff was theirs but don't say so, that's not a problem per se. I've seen this loads of times. You don't think insinuating is a very bad character signal?

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