I had a probationary programmer working for me. Needless to say, he never got to be permanent. One day I was inspecting his C code and found this:if ( a = 1 ) {...some code...} else {...some other code...I told him the "else" clause will never get executed because of his "if" statement. I asked him to figure out why. He said he'd "investigate" it first. I allowed him to "investigate," since it had not been a critical task.A day later, he told me he figured out the problem. He said he used an incorrect operand in the "if" statement -- it should have been == instead of =, which was absolutely correct. But then he emailed me his revised code.a = 1;if ( a == 1 ) {...some code...} else {...some other code...What the...?I asked him if the "a = 1" part was necessary and not just a fragment of debug code he forgot to remove. He said it was necessary. So I asked him if the "else" statement would ever be executed. He said yes. I asked him to give me a situation when such would occur. He said he'd get back to me with the explanation.I kicked him out of the project that same afternoon.