Taken from a comment I posted on HN in a thread about a Soccer Con Man.
Not actually a programmer. The guy was hired to be a project manager.
After joining things were as expected but after a few weeks we noticed that he was rarely around after lunch and never around after lunch on a Friday.
We would email him at those times deliberately to catch him out and I recall starting to put sticky notes on his laptop “Came to see you a X time”. He would come back and just dump all the notes in the rubbish and claim he never got them. He would often claim to be working from home, despite his laptop being on his desk and usually closed. He would also never responding during those times to email or IM.
A classic seagull manager he would appear when something went wrong, making a lot of noise, writing a lot of emails and then vanishing. He would also be sure to be seen when something was delivered often staying back late on those times.
It got so bad one friend of mine started tracking when he was around and then tracking when one of his relatives died. During his tenure the following incidents occurred,
– Hot water system blew up. 4 times. He had pictures which he would show all the time.
– Uncles, aunts, and various over family members died to the total of 20 individuals.
– Our time tracking him showed him to be in the office less than 15 hours a week on average.
We started to suspect he had a second job and was pulling the same con on them. This was never proved, but we did find someone who had worked with him previously and they reported the same behavior.
The worst thing was it was raised with management at least several dozen times and nothing ever happened. He managed to pull this scam off for 4 years. I could not believe the waste of money this guy was, literally $500,000 burnt on a useless individual.