To be honest, I don't often encounter this behavior in developers. In more management or leadership position, you can see it though.

Developers have concrete tasks to work on, what I often see is simply some of them can't really figure out how to complete the task if it's not layed out to them in every detail, and they can be very inefficient at overcoming any problem along the way.

The example of the developer stuck because of the clock is a good one. From my experience, this person isn't faking work, they really are stuck due to this problem and can't make decisions as to how to get past it, and don't know how to proceed.

Knowing that the clock doesn't matter and they can safely ignore it for example, is not something they know, or in this case, why it's wrong and how to fix it, they might also not know. They're stuck because they have no clue how to figure it out and need help.

Ya, it also means they're not as good as another developer that has a much deeper understanding and knows all this, but I wouldn't call a less knowledgeable or less talentented developer someone that's pretending to work or overrated.

Now you do have the kind of developer that's all talk, no walk. They are the ones that similarly don't know how to do things, or do things well, but they're very confident none the less, criticize others, and always talk as if they know and they're awesome.

Again though, I feel these developers everyone knows that they're all talk no walk, because other devs can see the kind of code they wrote or don't, what their real output is, etc. That said, to management sometimes it might not be as obvious.

But where things get real tricky is in management or leadership roles. Because in those positions, your job is to simply make decisions and guide others. But since you don't actually produce work, if you actually don't make any decisions, and actually don't help guide others in any valuable way, but still appear to be, the people actually doing the work will still have to figure out what to do and decide how to do it. And it becomes very easy to take the credit from them, as you were the "leader" or "manager".

And even when you're good at making the right decisions for the project or team, or company, and are good at guiding others, it's very hard to measure how much you contributed truly, what would have happened if you hadn't for example, it's almost impossible to know.

In those positions, it becomes almost about how well you can market that you did in fact have influence and were critical to success. And this is true even if you are really good, because it will be very hard for others to assess your real impact, so if you can't market it to them and make them know it, being good won't be enough.

It's a tricky situation, but it means that leaders and managers, both good and bad, will all be doing some form of what this article talks about, since they have too.

Another challenge in those roles, is that the impact of a single decision can be huge, but then for months you might not have to make any other decisions, and so you need to appear "busy" none the less. For example, choosing what is the next project the team will pick up, or that a new service will be created to deliver on X. Thats just one decision, but it's a huge decision, the impact of that choice is dramatic. Yet maybe you spent 2 months thinking about it, then took the decision, in that 2 months, you showed no sign of work, you were just thinking about what's the best way to proceed. And after having made the decision, there might be months where that's it, you've got nothing else to do but wait on other people to design and implement the new service X, or to deliver on project Z. Again, what do you do in the meantime? How do you not appear like you're no longer useful?