This pilot fish is an IT team lead, and most of his software developers are fine -- but then there's Fred.

"He had been a mechanic, and had no real computer training," says fish. "He took a one-week programming class, and then somehow convinced an IT manager that he was a programmer and was hired.

"I had the honor of being Fred's lead. He knew nothing. Once, when he was having a problem, I told him to copy several lines of code into his program without changing any of them. When he came back and said that it still wasn't working, I found he had totally rewritten it into gibberish.

"When the project was about to be delivered to the testers, his code still wasn't working. Over the next week, I totally rewrote his code. At least he thanked me.

"Over the years that followed, he went through the same pattern: His current manager would find another that hadn't heard of him yet, and get him transferred. But somehow for 15 years he was never fired."

Got a Fred of your own? Tell Sharky about it. Send me your true tale of IT life at sharky@computerworld.com. You can also comment on today's tale at Sharky's Google+ community, and read thousands of great old tales in the Sharkives.

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