Overheard during an interview:
Q: Do you know the programming language Querkle?
H1B: Yeah, Yeah, Yeah.
Q: How long have you worked with Querkle?
H1B: 5 years.
I’ve got a better one. This was in an interview:
Q: How many years of experience do you have with the Windows Server 2012 OS?
H1B: I have an MCSA in 2012 and two MCSEs in 2012.
Q: So you would say that you’re comfortable in the operating environment?
H1B: Yes, of course. I am fully-certified.
This person is hired as a contractor. We have an outage two weeks later where users cannot log into their machines due to domain response issues.
Q: Any idea why they can’t log into the production domain?
H1B: You said you wanted them consolidated, so I migrated all of the accounts to a single domain.
This person was summarily fired on the spot, and I spent the next week unraveling what they’d done with Microsoft helping me through the whole thing. This was a nightmare unlike any I’d ever seen.
I’d come to find out that the H1B crowd is often heavily subsidized to go through the MS bootcamps to just plow through the exams to get certifications without actually learning any of the material. When I’d explained to this person that they’d done something outside of change control and destroyed our infrastructure, his excuse was that he was doing what we asked him to do. No one asked him to do anything of the sort.