Working with a very small team we hired a gentleman with a fairly impressive resume. He’d earned the title of Senior Developer at one of his jobs with relatively few years experience, and kept it forward through several jobs since then.We hired him with the same title, and while I wasn’t a part of his interviews I know we normally included a few code-proficiency screeners.Well, he worked under our front end lead for a few weeks with very little progress. Finally my colleague couldn’t handle working with him anymore and forced our manager to make a change.The change was apparently to transfer him to my purview.So I spent a week working directly with him one-on-one.It was apparent he wasn’t familiar with the language we were using on the back-end, which was Java, but I’m a firm believer that you need good developers not good Java developers. We can teach syntax.I figured I’d be clever. I asked him his best language - it was PHP. I have a few years of PHP under my belt, so no problem! Solve it in PHP, I’ll translate.The problem was simple. I wanted a function that took a list of objects and returned a new list containing one of the attributes (the ID) from each.After nearly an hour, the only meaningful thing he’d managed to say was There are many ways to iterate a list in PHP, but none were forthcoming.Not only was he working as a programmer, he was a Senior Developer who was probably only a couple jobs away from transitioning into management.What may blow your mind is he wasn’t even our worst hire. Because he wrote so little code, we caught it early and very little damage was done beyond a little lost time.