Yap saw it. A large company someone new hired. Hung around for about a year, managed to write 100 lines of code. Only 10 were ever accepted after peer review.
However come meeting time, would be very vocal about random technologies -- we'd talk about spawning a process and he'd chime in how you can do this complicated kernel trick with signals, or shared memory and whatnot. At first everyone was impressed. Heck, I was.
After a while nobody saw any results from him though. When came time to show his results he started to claim to have health issues. So was gone for a while.
After a couple of months the manager caught on and kept assigning him different tasks hoping they'd finally find something he's good at. Would get as simple task, yet instead of just doing it, he would re-frame as some complicated theoretical problem, which needed research and the solution needed something like P vs NP solved in order to deliver it. Not sure if someone in the end explicitly told him that "Look Pete, it is a test function, just write the test function. You don't have to solve P vs NP to do it". (Pete is not his real name)
But yeah he was invited to depart, after collected a nice salary for about a year. He's probably at another company now doing the same thing.
There was this company (shall remain nameless) where the product was always "around the corner". Just one more week or two! Yes it doesn't work right now, but these are minor things, let us iron out the final bugs!
This went on for almost two years.
Leadership being non-technical, they didn't know whether what the "technical team" was telling them is true or not. They couldn't check, but were not idiots, so eventually suspected bullshit. So they hired us as "crisis consultants", to do an audit and put things back on track.
Needless to say, we had to scrap everything. Which, it turns out, was about half a dozen unfinished PHP scripts and some apache configs... the result of ~4 man-years of work!
The main employee squirmed and lied and lashed back during meetings. Not a pleasant experience at all. For anyone involved. When the true horror of the situation became apparent, they had to be let go.
Of course, this "worked out" only because we had the leadership's full backing (they really felt more shameful than angry, on account of their mismanagement), and because we could stand our ground technically. Now what to do if you're a grunt employee, without good access to leadership, observing such bullshit unfold... difficult. Chances are, the bullshitters are better at politics & smooth talking than you are, so confrontations are risky.
Similarly, impossibility results in distributed systems theory can act as a pretty good cover. Something along the lines of "You know, in a distributed setting you cannot distinguish node failure from delays in communication. So no, I won't be writing monitoring scripts for this service. They will be useless."
However come meeting time, would be very vocal about random technologies -- we'd talk about spawning a process and he'd chime in how you can do this complicated kernel trick with signals, or shared memory and whatnot. At first everyone was impressed. Heck, I was.
After a while nobody saw any results from him though. When came time to show his results he started to claim to have health issues. So was gone for a while.
After a couple of months the manager caught on and kept assigning him different tasks hoping they'd finally find something he's good at. Would get as simple task, yet instead of just doing it, he would re-frame as some complicated theoretical problem, which needed research and the solution needed something like P vs NP solved in order to deliver it. Not sure if someone in the end explicitly told him that "Look Pete, it is a test function, just write the test function. You don't have to solve P vs NP to do it". (Pete is not his real name)
But yeah he was invited to depart, after collected a nice salary for about a year. He's probably at another company now doing the same thing.