Here's a lesson in deception that everyone can learn from.
Let me start by telling a story from maybe 25 years ago, which is a much simplified version of this scheme.
I used to work for a defense contractor doing aircraft routing. We had a group of maybe 10 people working on our project which continued for several years. We all knew each other really well. There was a guy who was not a great developer. He would ask me questions once in a while and they were really, really simple questions. Then he would seem to be able to get other tasks done that were harder than the questions he asked.
This made no sense to me until one day we were all at lunch and this one guy was not there. Somehow we got to talking and turns out everyone had exactly the same experience. What this guy was doing was just taking turns asking different people different questions. In some cases I think some people wrote code for him.
He was a very friendly guy and nobody really held it against him. It was considered to be his way of surviving and he wasn't claiming great things for himself, wasn't getting paid exorbitantly. Not trying to scam anything just trying to get by.
Some years later on I saw what I thought was the same sort of pattern, but I had a lot of difficulty putting the pieces together until recently. So let me tell this story. It's the same sort of thing, someone who is not able to do the work.
I was assigned to help a group of people who had worked on an application for several years. I had been told that the application was "unusable". It was using old tech, which I did not really want to spend a great deal of effort to learn. I don't think there's a lot of point if you are already versed in newer technology, to go back and learn something you will never use again.
I was told the manager of the group in trouble wanted my help, but that was not the case. He did everything possible to thwart any suggestions I made, including doing dumb things in my area that I suspect they were pretending were my suggestions.
So, failing to get any traction with suggesting changes and feeling that the project could be rewritten with newer tech. I spent 2 months writing a POC. Not trusting the people in the other group because of previous interactions I had had with them, I did not tell them upfront that I was working on this, I suspected they would sabotage it and I felt I had to get it to a presentable state before I could demo it to them. I insisted that my manager, attend the demo. I thought that would protect me (LOL, he was in on the scam, it turned out).
We then started trying to work together on a new version of their application the following year.
The manager of the failing group had a woman and a man who were "following his tail" as the terminology is used on here. I'm gonna call those two people the tail-man and the tail-woman. The tail-woman I had dealt with before and she had already taken credit for something I had done, so I was suspicious of her.
The project with me started with this woman and another developer and myself. I knew to start that the documentation for the existing app had been written by the tail-man and the other developer. The tail-woman had not written anything other than a small document that was really bad. It had bullet points that said things like "I added this number to this number", "then I added this other number to that number". It must have documented about 20 lines of code. At that point I assumed that she had written the code, but I doubt that now. I suspect someone wrote it for her, and not knowing what it was doing, she could not explain the code any better than saying numbers were added together.
To start with, the manager called me and explained that tail-woman didn't actually work with anyone on the project. In fact, she never worked on the main code of the application at all. He told me that directly. He said that she would need to have "special tasks" given to her and if I worked on the project, I would need to invent "special tasks". I had no idea what he was talking about. I really needed to think more mafia-like. I suspected after the fact that he was telling me, she was "special" to him, like his girlfriend or something and I just didn't get that. So I asked a whole bunch of questions, trying to figure out why she needed "special tasks". I got not response or explanation and we just went on.
This woman supposedly did work on this project. The first piece she was supposed to do was to create the initial framework that I would check my POC code into. To me, this should have been done in a handful of days, but she dragged it out for 3 weeks for some reason. Now I suspect someone did that work for her, she had to wait for someone's availability, perhaps?
We divided up tasks. Since I had written the POC, I wanted the people in the group to feel comfortable with the whole thing, I wanted them to own large pieces of the code for the future. I wrote a design doc and assigned a large area to the other developer. I tried to do the same for the tail-woman, at this point, I assumed she could do work.
But, after going through what she would work on, she would then not respond to any of my emails about it afterwards. The manager was equally vague about the whole thing, and the large section of work that was really important to do, just never got assigned to anyone. I had no idea why at the time.
They were just bizarre.
As things went along the tail-woman was assigned some small pieces and the manager added some bizarre tasks to her that used the older tech which was a complete waste of time. He said this had to be done because he only had developers that new the old tech. Which was ridiculous, since I was there to teach the new tech. It was just bizarre.
The tail-man was supposedly running the old application maintenance. There were tasks that the tail-woman did where on one day she would tell us that she had no idea how to do that task and literally in the next day she would have the code to demo. It didn't make any sense.
Later I suspected that someone else was writing her code. Now, I suspect that was the tail-man. After all, the manager wouldn't have excluded that guy from the new development I suspect, since he was "following the manager's tail".
The tail-man also spoke very highly of the tail-woman.
My suspicion now is that they had been doing this for years. The reason the tail-woman never worked directly with anyone else in the project was because it would become extremely obvious that she had no idea what she was doing and they couldn't allow that to happen.
So, they made a trio that lied together. What is the benefit of doing this for the two men involved? For the woman I suspect the benefit was bonuses and raises.
I suspect the manager of being her boyfriend, but why is the other guy doing the work for the woman? The only thing I can think of is just job security? He was an older guy and he was in on the scam and that makes him very important to the manager. Maybe he's getting the big bonuses too?
I suspect now that this had been going on for literally years. The manager didn't want me there because I would figure it out eventually. The scam to get me to leave is equally bizarre and all the lies they told about me in the process.
I can now see why they were all so desperate to keep their jobs, although I suspect the tail-man, who was doing the work, could really leave if he wanted to.
The tail-woman is the one who is really screwed. She had missed getting years of experience and if she had lost her job, she would have had nothing.
The rest of the people in the group are also getting cheated. The other developer, in particular, who was harassed by the tail-man, should have gotten more credit and most-likely more money. There were other people working on the project also, who were also getting cheated.
The manager would try to get me to feel sorry for this woman. It was such a sad scam.
And the problem for me was that at the end of whole thing they were sabotaging the code and blaming me for not treating the tail-woman well, when I knew she knew nothing and was moving code around to break things, she would not reply to emails and would never ask me any questions about anything.
This was all about placing blame, isolating the right people, and having the right people around you to tell the lies. The people in the main group had no idea what was going on. The three at the top controlled all information.
While this happened many, many years ago, I think it still has relevance today. It's amazing what lengths people will go to run a scam like this.