Incompetence in the Workplace

I mentioned in one of my earlier posts (http://ronaldjbrown.blogspot.com/2011/05/how-i-stole-multi-million-dollar.html  May, 2011) a systems manager from Digital Equipment Corporation who sat at a customer’s site for a year and yet didn’t make any effort to tackle the severe performance problems they were having—problems that could have been solved, as I had demonstrated, with minimal knowledge and effort on her part. She, and her employer, DEC, lost the contract, worth several millions of dollars, with client as a result. As fate would have it, I wound up working with her a few years later.

We were part of a team of system managers supporting remote clients from one central location. Her specific client was a small life insurance company. Once a week I would overhear her in a conference call with the client. She seemed to spend the entire 20 minutes or so that the call took talking about her family, sharing details that interested no one except herself. She had a list of items that the client wanted addressed and, every week she would report that she was working on them. Working in such close quarters with her, I knew better. She spent all her time at work, when she wasn’t going on about her family, playing silly computer games and reading some sort of online novel, though she seemed to always be on the same page whenever I passed behind her and could see what was on her monitor.

I heard later from the project manager of the contract that the clients had been begging him to find someone to replace her. Things moved slowly. First DEC was bought out by Compaq which was itself bought out by Hewlett-Packard and still the babble about family dominated the weekly conference calls with the insurance company. One evening my manager said that he wanted to meet with me at 10:00 the next morning. I was coming down with the flu and asked if he could telephone me instead. I had a premonition of what was happening and waited by the phone anxiously the next morning. He phoned at about 11:00 and said that he just wanted to let me know that he had let the failing system manager go. I was relieved. I had suspected that this was coming, but, I couldn’t be certain that I wasn’t the one who was going to be shown the door. I asked who was taking over her clients and he told me he hadn’t decided yet. I knew, though, that I was the most likely candidate.

Sure enough a few days later I was introduced to the client in the scheduled weekly conference. I asked for, and received by email, a list of the items my predecessor had been working on. I shook my head in disbelief as I looked it over. She had been “working” on some “problems” for more than a year. In fact she had “been searching for a license” for printer that the client had purchased almost two years earlier. There was no such license; all that the printer needed was to be initialized with the correct binary code that I looked up in the printer manual. What had to be done was go to the client’s site and send the printer the documented instructions to get it working. When I visited the client a few weeks later that is exactly what I did; it took me approximately two minutes to type the string of characters that the printer had been waiting for (this was long before “plug and play” had become standard).

Her other outstanding projects were similarly extremely simple and could have been done by anyone with the minimal training required for her position. For example, creating a batch queue would have taken about two minutes of her time; there it sat on the list for some 18 months while she “investigated.”  Creating batch and printer queues was a job I usually assigned to the most junior members of any team I worked with. So, within a week I had cleared all the outstanding issues, except for the printer which required me to make an overnight trip to the client’s location. The project manager had a habit of showing up unexpectedly and quietly coming up behind his system manager to see what she, or now I, was working on. As luck would have it, he always caught me in the midst of doing some minor task for the client, something, he told me with some bitterness, he had never caught my predecessor doing.

I have never understood why some businesses keep employees who obviously cannot perform the tasks required by their position. When I was in a position to I fired such employees with no delay or fuss. They were given a month to clean up their act; everything they were assigned and produced (or not) was documented; and at the end of the month I’d meet with them and the personnel director and have them escorted off the premises. If I didn’t have firing privileges I would document the person’s failings, what attempts had been made to help them, and the outcome and forward it to the appropriate manager. In every case that I can recall, my advice was followed. I never felt badly about that because it created the opportunity to offer the position to someone who had the talent and ability to do the job. It amazes me that, despite the poorly-performing economy, there are so many incompetent people holding down positions that could be filled by people who know what they are doing.

I guess I was just a cold-hearted bastard in the working world, but I do believe that what I did was the best for everyone concerned. The company would get rid of someone not producing and replace them with someone who could deliver; someone with skills would be given an opportunity to work; and the person let go would no longer have to kill time at work doing boring, irrelevant, and soul-destroying tasks.