The Matasano hiring process (to which this article refers) was designed in part because of this bad experience you've never had. I've seen it happen repeatedly over my career; people who'd pass interviews and then, over 15-20 minutes of face-to-face discussion a couple weeks on the job, not be able to comprehend the idea that a C pointer needs to point to valid memory.

That's what's so mind-blowing to me about our terrible process today. It aggressively tries to find and dispatch unqualified candidates, so much so that it forcefully repels talented people. And it fails miserably at screening out people who can't code! It is the worst case scenario of processes.

It's also really important to remember that the problem is People Who Can't Code, not "People Not Smart Enough To Code". Time and again I've "worked" with people who could very effectively critique my own code, who could participate in design meetings down to the bits-and-bytes layer, and, having taken responsibility for actually implementing some portion of those designs, could not commit usable code to save their life. I don't know what the deal with these people is, but they are out there: plenty smart, totally fluent, and completely ineffective.

I was talking to Erin this weekend about the phenomenon and realized that these people not only exist, but are actually favored by the way the market works. A smart person can last many months in a dev role before anyone realizes they're ineffective. Then, it takes many, many more months to manage them out of the team. By the time the story plays itself out, the bad team member has more than a year on the job, and when they parlay that resume line item to another prominent job elsewhere, their previous teammates aren't outraged but instead relieved. They end up with gold-plated resumes and tons of credibility.