A hiring round nearly two decades ago we realised something was off with the answers to the usual pre-phone interview screening questions. They were simple, and we asked people to only spend like 20 minutes on them. We knew people would "cheat", but they were only there to lighten our load a little bit, so it was ok if they let through some bad candidates.
But for whatever reason, in one hiring round the vast majority had cut and pasted answers from search results verbatim (we dealt with a new recruiter, and I frankly suspected this new recruiter was telling them this was ok despite the instructions we'd given).
These were not subtle. But the very worst one was one who did like the developer you described: He'd found a forum post about a problem pretty close to the question, had cut and pasted the code from the first answer he found.
He'd not even bothered to read a few comments further down in the replies where the answer in question was totally savaged by other commenters explaining why it was entirely wrong.
This was someone who was employed as a senior developer somewhere else, and it was clear in retrospect looking at his CV that he probably kept "fleeing the scene of the crime" on a regular basis before it was discovered he was a total fraud. We regularly got those people, but none that delivered such obviously messed up answers.
For ever developer like this, you're probably right there will be a lot more that are less extreme about it, and more able to make things work well enough that they're not discovered.
It is hard for some people to grasp the sheer amount of fraud in this industry. A while back I worked with two guys, one with a Master's and the other with a PhD. One day they came to me asking for help, because the program they'd written (in Python) wouldn't run. It was supposed to analyze some text, and spit out whatever the result of the analysis was.
The problem? They were passing the input text as hardcoded plaintext, i.e. it wasn't even a string with quotes or anything -- just `foo(here is my raw, non-string input, no quotes necessary lol)`, and they could not conceive of what the issue might be.
That has to be bug blindness? I.e. they have decided that there is no bug at that line, and can't see it afterwards. How could they even write the program in the first place, if they were not aware of string literals?
But for whatever reason, in one hiring round the vast majority had cut and pasted answers from search results verbatim (we dealt with a new recruiter, and I frankly suspected this new recruiter was telling them this was ok despite the instructions we'd given).
These were not subtle. But the very worst one was one who did like the developer you described: He'd found a forum post about a problem pretty close to the question, had cut and pasted the code from the first answer he found.
He'd not even bothered to read a few comments further down in the replies where the answer in question was totally savaged by other commenters explaining why it was entirely wrong.
This was someone who was employed as a senior developer somewhere else, and it was clear in retrospect looking at his CV that he probably kept "fleeing the scene of the crime" on a regular basis before it was discovered he was a total fraud. We regularly got those people, but none that delivered such obviously messed up answers.
For ever developer like this, you're probably right there will be a lot more that are less extreme about it, and more able to make things work well enough that they're not discovered.