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!".

@CrabbiesGingerBeer , probably parachuted in.

@logo1236 , do you mean that you never had an interview where you didn't have a test, never had an interview or never had an interview where you were tested?

I think you’re right: parachuted in…

If he was foreign it is possible he falsified his degree

@Ilovecleaning , it amazes me that people voted for him. Not just the constituency but the party and the general electorate.

I have friends who live in 'safe seats' and they won't vote for anyone who's not a Tory.

I cannot fathom who to vote for this election, let alone understand how anyone thinks a tory vote is good, given their record, lies, selling off anything not nailed down, lies, robbing the country by given contracts away to friends, incompetence, lies, freeports, lies, etc. oh and lies

Used to work in various hotels while at uni as a waitress, one of the best was a guy on the team who would come and literally refuse to do anything as it was 'not a part of his job'. No one knew what was as he only liked to serve tea and coffee.

@chaosmaker , I always vote for who I'd think would make the best constituency MP. I live in a 'safe seat' constituency and the choice is usually Red or Blue.

I have lived in another safe seat and didn't vote for the safe seat candidate as he was new and it would go against the grain for that party.

The next town along has an excellent constituency MP in a safe seat. Despite having never voted for the party that candidate represents, I might if I lived there, but it would go against the grain to vote for that party. I suspect I could safely not vote and the incumbent would get voted in anyway.

I used work for a coding bootcamp. Most students were beginners so the teaching job required 2 skills - being good at coding and being good at explaining technical concepts in a very simplified way. Co-worker was a complete tech bro who owned a start up and was teaching on the side. I swear he would go out of his way to explain things in the most roundabout, complicated way an confusing all the students.

The kicker was he kept complaining to me about the students being dumb and not understanding anything. He even went off on the students once during a lesson basically calling them idiots. I was mortified as these students were paying like 10k for this course!

Another example is a co-worker who did not have English as her first language, her English was fine, but she kept using phrases the wrong way and sometimes translated them literally in e-mails to co-workers and clients (think translating taking the piss as peeing), which is not her fault, but she absolutely refused to listen when anyone would try to correct her. She insisted she was right and kept sending the e-mails.

We had a trainee solicitor in our department once who never seemed to do any work. I'd give him a task as the other trainee already had plenty and find out a couple of days later that he'd foisted it onto her to complete as he was "too busy". No matter how many times I challenged him on this he always somehow found a way of passing his work to someone else to do.

Unfortunately several of the equity partners seemed to think the sun shone out of his arse. Quite astonishing as we have to record all our chargeable time and have minimum daily targets. So either he was falsifying his or they were willing to turn a blind eye.

He was one of those sickening people whose "face fits". Public school, swaggering, confident, funny, good looking, well dressed, could charm the birds from the trees. People with that sort of charisma get away with far more than they deserve. When he qualified they kept him on despite some loudly expressed concerns from colleagues. I think the view taken was that he was exactly the image the firm wanted to have and if he could just get his time recording sorted it would be perfect.

He's no longer with us but wasn't fired - got headhunted by another firm for vastly more money FFS.

Other incompetent colleagues:

Woman with terrible drink problem. Kept a half bottle of vodka in her handbag and would glug from it in the toilet cubicle. (This was Civil Service not law firm. ) Had worked there 20 years and was offered lots of help and support but then one day DROVE to work totally blotto, fell downstairs as could hardly walk, so she had to be fired. I veered between being horrified by the drunk driving and being sorry for her that her life was such a mess as she was a nice lady otherwise.

Had an office junior once who seemed to think the job was to entertain her. Would refuse to do anything that didn't interest her (until told sharply that she had to, then burst into tears about how "horrible" her supervisor was). Refused to make tea for one visitor as she "didn't like his face". Would regularly call in sick on Fridays but recover enough by the afternoon to drop by and pick up her pay packet... She did get a bit better (though not much) with some firm management.

Also not a colleague but a cleaning firm we used at home. I asked the manager if she could make sure the cleaners could sweep/ clean under the freestanding bath as lots of dust was building up. She was shocked I expected this and said that the gap was low down and could only be reached by bending right down. Well, yes, and perfectly possible- I had often done so myself. I was surprised that a cleaner considered it unreasonable to bend down to clean! When we moved house I ditched them and do my own cleaning again.

This thread has reminded me of a pgce trainee teacher I mentored once, and his uni tutor. This was at a prestigious Eton group school so he was lucky to get it for his second placement.

He was so incompetent. He'd show powerpoints he hadn't even read beforehand and it'd be painfully obvious to the kids as every slide took him by surprise. He'd set them questions he couldn't answer himself. He never planned a lesson properly or marked anything on time. His subject knowledge was woeful. He never took my advice because he thought he knew better. He'd spend time reformatting worksheets instead of actually planning. Kids would misbehave and he wouldn't even see it, and argue with me afterwards when I told him during feedback.

The worst bit was this. The uni tutor was worse! Even more disorganised and generally gormless. Never held him to account. One time the tutor said to him "you probably need to spend 50% more time on planning a week as you do now." I said "maybe even double!" And the tutor corrects me "50% is more than double." This was a science subject...top pgce provider in the country... wtf.

He passed as well. I wrote him an 11 page report, recommending he should repeat the 2nd placement, with loads of feedback and analysis. But it's a shortage subject with govt quotas so they just waved him through.

They wouldn't need to be foreign for that, though admittedly weird and wonderful bits of paper from unheard-of Unis can complicate things

Sadly I've seen too many fakes for UK ones, even Oxbridge

In my last job we had a trainee who, although very nice, was completely unteachable. He’d ask someone a simple question, they’d take the time to not only provide the answer but explain how to reach that conclusion, however if it differed from the answer he was expecting he wouldn’t accept it. Instead he’d wait a while, then ask someone else and when they gave the same answer, he’d repeat the process. Eventually he’d end up asking management his question who really weren’t pleased to bothered by easily answerable questions. The whole process could last for most of the day, meaning some days he got almost nothing done and the entire team were taken away from their work for no reason.

He ended up having to move to a completely different department as his stubbornness prevented him from progressing.

As someone who is usually very self-critical, I'm actually a bit in awe of how some of these people sail on regardless 🙃

@Puzzledandpissedoff I came across a senior manager in my former employers (now retired!) who claimed to have been at the same university as I was, albeit some years later. During the course of a conversation he was having one time with a group of people including me, it became crystal clear that he had never been to my university, in fact I don't think he'd ever set foot in the place. He didn't know that I'd gone there, and the look on his face when I mentioned that I had was priceless.

Had, not was

This. The company I work for has a rating system when deciding which temps to keep. It’s based on the interview and not the candidates proven ability to do the job. Lazy staff get kept on because they ‘rated higher’ in the interview than the hard working and more competent employees who were nervous in interviews. I hate it.

I've a feeling I've just had the misfortune to inherit someone who could be a thread all by themselves.

So far I've had a long list of can't dos and a couple of emails delegating their work up to me. Next weeks 1:1 is going to be interesting.

How does someone get away with giving their workplace a list of "can't dos" if those are part of the job?

I agree. I remember being at college in London in the late 90s and quizzically looking at the one computer in the library as people were whispering it had the ‘internet’.

A paralegal in our team who threw a load of original medical records (which we were due to return to the practice, we were reviewing in the course of litigation) in the shredding bin.

And then lied about it.

All employees in law firms are regulated by the SRA, and lying is THE number one thing you mustn’t do as a lawyer. The mistake might be excruciating, but the lying could have you disciplined, or even struck off.

Thankfully he told other paralegals that he’d lied, and was quickly reported. He spent a day on his hands and knees searching through the shredding bins to retrieve those medical records.

I also overheard him telling a client that signing a declaration of truth is just a formality. It isn’t, it’s a criminal offence to sign a declaration of truth without being confident the content of what you’re signing is true. I explained this to him. 2 days later he gave the same “advice” to another client!

He got a training contract at another law firm. I won’t be surprised to one day hear he’s been struck off.

How does someone get away with giving their workplace a list of "can't dos" if those are part of the job?

I've a feeling I'm about to find out. So far, I've had can't send emails due to dyslexia, can't phone clients because she gets flustered and can't answer the department phone as she's a manager and it's not her job. Seriously. This is a woman in her forties paid £36k to manage an office team. First job this morning is to speak to her previous line manager. .

IME people get away with it either because their manager is too ‘nice’ to do proper performance management or because their manager is up for it but knows they won’t be backed up by seniors and HR if / when the person raises a grievance or claims discrimination or does any of the other myriad formal and informal things that an employee can do to make their manager’s life unpleasant.

It's a calculation, is the huge amount of time, effort and stress involved in performance managing this person properly going to stop the manager from doing all the rest of their job? What is more important, dealing with one poor performer or the actual work for clients / customers?

The story above about the public school boy who got away with being a useless trainee solicitor doesn't surprise me at all, but I bet if he'd been female, even attractive, public school educated, it would have been a different story!

Someone suggested a redlist of people not to employ - I suspect a lot of pretty competent women would be on it, due to the fact that women have to be twice or more as good as men to be treated as competent.

Because they are lazy delegators who can't actually do their jobs but are clever at manipulating others into doing it for them . I watched a documentary called Manager do it until her two lynchpins retired and weren't replaced. That's when the wheels fell off the bus and she was sacked for incompetence. It took 18 years .