Around 2001 I was working at Broadcom's networking division in San Jose. The switch chip we were working on (10Gbps x 8 ports) was understaffed and we hired a contractor at $120/hr to do verification of the design. He was pretty young, but he came across as confident and capable, and every weekly meeting he was reporting good progress.

Unfortunately we weren't reviewing his work, just trusting his reports, as we were overworked getting our own parts done. After a three months of this I said to the project lead: something smells wrong, because he hasn't filed a single bug against my design yet.

So we looked at his code, lots of files and lots of code written, all of it plumbing and test case generation, but he hadn't built the model of the chip's behavior. At the heart of it was a function which was something like:

    bool verify_pins(...) {
       return true;
    }

We asked him what was going on, and he said he was in over his head and had been putting off the hard part. Every morning was lying to himself that that was the day we was going to finally start tackling building the model for the DUT. His shame seemed genuine. My boss said: we aren't paying you for the last pay period, just go away and we won't sue you.

My boss and I literally slept at work for a month, with my boss building the model and fixing other TB bugs, and I addressed the RTL bugs in the DUT as he found them.