At my first job in dev (which was only about five years go), I certainly didn't turn out code like this developer. I was also tasked with a much more significant task than just writing a screen scraper. I had to reverse-engineer a piece of industrial hardware that had been abandoned by its vendor, write software to interface with it, and then integrate that software into our production environment. This meant looking at a great deal of existing code (both in the form of written code, and ladder-logic for PLCs) and wiring diagrams.
In comparison to that, writing a small screen scraper is trivial. I didn't expect him to know the ins and outs of all the frameworks and libraries we use, but he should have been well-grounded enough to write software that isn't shameful, to do research where research was needed, and to ask questions when he needed direction.