Yes, that is part of her job, but it wasn't covered in the interview process from what I've been told.

I've worked with plenty of tech and related people who didn't understand basic technologies we expect in a given field.

I tend to reserve judgement until their effort can be judged. If he or she is slow but learning and improving, I'd accept (and probably raise with a manager) that the hiring process is flawed and try to help him/her.

If its just utter idiocy, I'm less forgiving.

I literally had a business analyst come to me - the new guy at the time - on her last day after several years of working in the org and ask me what her email address is.

Or the BA who insisted she didnt need to write a clear and specific spec for a feature, because she could just open up dreamweaver and put some buttons on a page.

Those sorts of people I have zero fucking time for, and will drink merrily when they quit/are fired.

Unfortunately, they tend to be promoted quickly. For being so brilliant, you understand.

And then they're your boss. Or your boss's mate.

Does she even bother looking at the docs or would that also denote how useless she is?

Well, she is learning it now and I wouldn't call her "useless". But her level of experience and knowledge is far below "software engineer" and if she were a guy she couldn't get away with it.

you'd be surprised. i worked with people who would write simple json structures by creating a class in java and then serializing it and printing it to the console to copy and paste. most of them were promoted out to management

Actually, there is a certain wisdom to promoting incompetent people in this manner. At least then you know that they're nowhere near anything they can use to do real lasting damage.

> they're nowhere near anything they can use to do real lasting damage

Except, make 'technical management' decisions like "we should use mongodb because it's web-scale".

> and if she were a guy she couldn't get away with it

I think this is untrue. I know a lot of male "sofware engineers" who are totally incompetent and remain well employed.

Presumably the OP meant "remain in that role in the company"; not necessarily intending to extrapolate to all positions at all companies.

The best C++ programmer (someone who does real magic in the machine) I know has said that they can't think in SQL. Different people have different skills and mindsets.