Most incompetent person you ever worked with/hired

[Medsy]

I've got a new colleague, he has been here for 2 months and I 100% understand it takes time to be eased/trained into a new role, but this is next level. It's actually making me wonder whether he lied on his CV or at interview. There are really, really basic aspects to the industry he doesn't seem to have heard of, the other day he was struggling to use a simple Word feature, and one of the requirements was a foreign language which he said he was proficient in.
Ultimately I am going to have to work with him as a pair and I am trying to be as helpful and generous as I can but a part of me thinks why have they hired him?@
Opening the floor....Have you ever worked with or hired someone where it went beyond just incompetence and you thought "WTF is going on!".

I remember once using the editor function (the one that scores on readability) on a document - this was a type of document I regularly used and just tweaked and usually went straight to 99% - the score came out at 52% and I thought whaaat? Further investigation revealed it had, apparently randomly, reset the language part and was assessing the spelling and readability of my UK English document ... in Spanish.

If he is still in his probation period, don’t make the mistake of passing him through because he’s nice. It is much worse to have to put someone on a performance plan a year or so down the line when you like them more and they are more embedded but their errors make it impossible for you to keep them on.

You can extend a probation period and put concrete performance standards in place for them to meet by the end of the extended period. I cannot tell you how much I wish I had done this with a junior colleague I had to dismiss last year. Would have been better for both of us.

You can set spellcheck for a specific language, for example British English, American English, Italian etc.

I’m not sure I understand 🤔 if you’re a teacher, you’re teaching. What you are teaching is the objective, surely?

If I'd asked somebody to type something as part of an interview process, I'd check it by reading it too. Spellcheck is not much good if you don't actually know how to spell. This is old but still relevant.

Worked in civil service at a entry level clerical level years ago. Pretty much our only job was filing and pulling paper files kept in alphabetical order. Worked with a 40 something guy who didnt know the alphabet. As the senior staff member I had to follow him around and constantly correct his work( as in re file it).

In case you were wondering, English was his first language, no learning disabilities and extremely intelligent.Lovely, respectful chap to talk to, it was just infuriating.

None of the other clerical staff were allowed to say anything to him and this went on for years. Role was phased out with the advent of paperless offices and we all moved on.

Me, as a waitress in uni. I was comically awful. My trial shift i flooded the kitchen, and it went downhill from there.

I worked at that restaurant all through uni, somehow. But having me as a waitress would ensure your tables would get Faulty Towers levels of service. People felt so bad for me that they tended to overtip, because they could see i was trying and genuinely sorry about all the mistakes. Once I'd worked there for 6 months customers were still regularly assuming i was a new starter because of my level of incompetence.

@Cherrysoup Went for an interview involving typing speed once. The girl checking my work started to manually check for errors. I suggested she use spellcheck.

Spellcheckers don't find typos that are real words. They won't spot loose/lose, inn/in, pubic/public type errors.

Maybe the university hadn't given her any opportunity to do a work placement during her final year- or if they had may be she didn't take it up for some reason ?

Ward work in the NHS.

30% of staff are new international nurses. Most are unable to read or write in English to an acceptable standard. Very little lnowlesge of infection control. No understand of consent, empathy or care at all.

Blatantly dangerous practice.

Complain and get told you're racist and unsupportive.

I once had a months overlap with my incoming mat leave cover as a junior Dr. He was so incompetent that it was definitely a safety issue which I flagged to managers

He would disappear off for hours and be uncontactable which is obviously a safety issue. If challenged he would say his bleep must not be working as he had got no calls even when we had all been calling him. In actual fact he had switched it off. Accidentally he said.

He did precisely no work and let me do it all at 8 months pregnant. It soon transpired this was because he had no idea how to do anything at all. Not examining or interviewing patients, not prescribing or reviewing test results, nothing. He even fucked up writing some paracetamol on a drug chart. I did begin to wonder how he could have passed a medical degree.

Once he arrived back from an extended lunch break without the crash bleep which he was supposed to be carrying and being part of the resus team. We went back to look for it and I found it buried amongst the sandwiches in the canteen where it was merrily chirping away to itself (the crash team were definitely better off without him).

English was not his first language and he was comically bad. He asked me the word for something and was pointing in the vicinity of his knee. I started off with medical words like meniscus, cruciate ligament etc then went down to joint and knee cap and finally we established that 'leg' was the word he didn't know.

You will be relieved to know that they did fire him after about 2 weeks of this and got someone halfway decent.

One of mine who was apparently in the top % of users of Excel (according to his him) couldn't even do percentages on the program. Even I can do that!

I can’t remember the last time I looked at the national curriculum as it has been so long since I have worked in a school that used it.

@Peteryourhorseishere this made me laugh. This is me all through, which is why I’m now self-employed. I can annoy the boss as much as I like.

One thing I have learned over the years is that rank in no indicator of ability.

Hmm well I’ve learned something about spellcheck, I didn’t know you could change the language! But I still wouldn’t use it for the reasons given above - I’d prefer to rely on my own skills. It’s a little thing but it shows that for some of the examples people are giving, these are preferences rather than knowledge gaps. We can all seem incompetent in one someone else’s eyes for the odd thing, and if that’s our own experience of someone we can judge too harshly. I say that having worked in very toxic environments where this happened a lot.

I had to train a new staff member once. I showed him absolutely everything and I was very proficient in my job. This lasted 4+ months and then he was left on his own to do it after a gradual introduction. It included sending out mass emails to various clients with reports etc. All of which is he trained in fully.

As soon as he was left to his own devices, he fell apart. Sent the wrong emails to the wrong clients with sensitive information. He sent internal emails to the wrong DLs. He wasnt doing reports. One day he said he did everything and when I checked after he left NOTHING had been done and I had to start a full days work at 6pm.

He got pulled in for his performance then tried to pin it on me. They said I wasnt to blame - as I checked in on him throughout the day and asked him if he was unsure then to ask. He then said it was his "mental health" took a breakdown on the office as he was actually being challenged then went on sick for 4 months.

When he came back, instead of failing his probation, he was put in charge of "stationary" so he basically went up and down checking everyone had pens and paper. He was paid the same as us.

I heard he got a promotion recently, a year after leaving and he is still checking paper in the printers.

Guy should have been let go a long time ago.

That's complete bollocks. I grew up using BBC computers in the classroom in the 1980s and was programming robots in the same period. My Dad, now in his 70s was the teacher teaching the classes these things.

I also had a laptop for my degree from 2002 onwards.

Excel has indeed been out since the 90s. It's now 2024. You've had over a quarter of a century to learn to use a basic programme which has been used in offices for most of that period.

You also have the option to go on a training course for the programme. There are hundreds of them out there and your employer may even agree to pay for it.

Where I work it's an information security issue. Mobiles get used to authenticate identity for logging into systems (or as an actual phone!) but we don't use our own, we're issued with one. And they're not keen on people using them for their work. We can only use approved apps on approved devices, preferably using a wired connection rather than wifi or mobile.

Supply teacher who just handed out photocopied word searches to every class she took. She had no idea how to teach and after the class inevitably began to misbehave she would retreat to the landing and cry. Head teacher turned a blind eye because of staff shortages until teaching assistants refused to work with her.

Once supported a student teacher who was a prolific liar. He’d frequently turn up with no lessons planned (dog ate it kind of thing) and once took a day off for an interview at a school we later discovered was closed for Easter and had no vacancies. Not that long after we failed him and he left the course, I read in the local news that he’d been arrested for stealing from his employer (in a local bar). Police found over 100k in notes in his bedroom!

We hired a young person for an entry level but professional job in banking. She stayed for a couple of months, then resigned, as she found the job too boring. Fair enough.

But 3 months later, she came back. Was very surprised that her job had not been kept open for her. Took us to employment tribunal claiming that nobody explained to her that once you resign, you no longer have the job.

I got this guy a job once. He had a masters degree, worked in housing. Seemed OK.

He was so useless and inept and unpopular! butnot only that he was aggressive and volatile. Picking fights with people!

it was embarrassing. Luckily he resigned.

Someone similar to the OPs in that there's a basic competence in IT lacking.

But how can this be avoided if people lie or massively exaggerate during the interview?

Someone mentioned that they gave interviewees a fairly basic IT test - which is a good idea but we're taking about management level here, and would you run the risk of patronising people at that level?

In the case of the woman mentioned originally, it also sounded as if she wasn't taking working from home at all seriously.