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!".

2 that stick out in my mind from my time in retail banking.
1st worked at another branch but was a union rep as they worked out they got paid time off for their union work- did absolutely nothing as a union rep! Used to visit our branch and just lock himself in an office for the whole time- occasionally coming out to “borrow a stamp” or something equally stupid. I eventually had the misfortune to go on relief to a branch he worked in (he was moved around a lot as managers got sick of him)- he did as little work as humanly possible in the branch too- no idea how he kept his job!
2nd one was a manager who couldn’t have managed her way out a paper bag. They kept giving her secondment roles that she was useless at too. Had the misfortune to end up on a training course when she was seconded to a training role- happened to be one she was being observed on- the person observing took over the course half way through she was so bad! Later they seconded her to a union role (don’t ask it was a dodgy arrangement to get employees to sign up to the union the bank could influence) she was awful at that too!

An academic I knew many years ago was a professor and head of department. He hired a woman in her 30s or 40s to be the departmental secretary*. She was apparently pleasant but utterly clueless. He was going to give a lecture and had prepared a handout, several pages long. He printed it off and gave it to M, asking her to make 20 copies. Later that day she gave him a big stack of paper. 20 pages of page 1, below that 20 pages of page 2, and so on. It hadn't occurred to her that she should collate and staple the copies so that they were just like the original and could be handed out in no time to the people attending. Apparently in the school holidays her primary aged daughter came in with her and helped out. She was much more on the ball and efficient than her mum even at that age. M didn't last long in the job, sadly.

*Probably not much competition. University salaries were low in comparison with private sector salaries. Very possible also that the job description and interview questions were poor as well. HR at that university was abysmal, as I found when I worked there myself.

@Medsy , take a few minutes out and show the colleague what to do.

@ThanksAntsThants23 , I get it. A question like how to do something I do several times a day when I'm not by my computer will stump me.

I worked briefly with someone who was unable to do this - they were extremely intelligent and well qualified, but just couldn't count or add up. This was about 25 years ago. I've wondered since if they might have had undiagnosed dyscalculia. The person left by mutual agreement after a few weeks because the job did require basic maths skills.

Warn his hiring manager, get him out before probation ends.

Someone working with data who didn't even know how to do simple things in Excel. Like copy + paste special + transpose data. Turns out growing up they didn't have a computer and their degree didn't require computer skills above typing essays. So we brought in basic Microsoft skills tests at interview to make sure employees at least had the basics. A very clever and competent person generally. But no Excel skills and no aptitude to learn them.

Talking about bullshitters in interview. My boss (who had a history of being overexcited and jumping the gun) was raving on about the amazing replacement he hired for my role (I did a sideways move internally). I had to give the guy a handover, it was also the last week before I went on maternity leave. The guy spent the entire time of our handover talking about how amazing he was and all the shit hot experience he had - didn’t listen to a word that came out of my mouth - after about 10 minutes I just sat back and zoned out thinking it was obvious no handover was going to take place, and that he was utterly full of shit. Within the same week HR followed up on one of his reference and it turned out that he’d made stuff up completely, and he was let go before he even properly started.

To be honest with you, apart from crying in front of others, I can completely relate. I also have an university degree. Worked for about two years in my life and then stopped. Sorted myself out through a lucrative marriage, child free and that's it. Now at almost fifty, I don't need anything from life anymore and ... I'm happy with it! 😃 Different people, I guess!

There are so many, it is hard to single any one out and my current senior management is off the scale as regards lack of common sense, ability to deal with any form of issue and the only thing they manage successfully is hiding virtually! One temporary employee though, a daughter of a colleague, covered the need for us to archive and sort old files, getting ready for an important inspection. She had no idea of the alphabet, struggle with spelling and names, and made such a mess we had to let her go after two weeks and then re-do everything she had touched, it was a huge disaster and even her Mum was embarrassed by how awful she was. She had just gained a 2:1 in English and is now a Primary School Teacher! She put stamps on letters upside down and we had to provide a written script for her to be able to answer calls correctly, comprising of 'Good Morning, Good Afternoon, You are speaking to XXXXXX, how can I help you?'. That's who is teaching our future generations, a role she took on after failing to gain a publishing job!

Many years ago, I worked with a manager who did absolutely nothing other than review papers I wrote or presentations I made. He would of course present them and would always edit them with thungs that didn't matter. Like change the font or colour scheme. So if it was blue and yellow, he would change it to blue and green. Next time, I would use blue & green, he would change it to red and orange and do on.

I was fairly young and just put up with it while looking for another job.

Things finally came to a head when he had a review meeting and was put on a PIP. He came back to the office and yelled at me in front of everyone saying "they are putting me on a PIP because they think you do everything". One colleagues shouted "she does" and another clapped. He told is all to go fuck ourselves.

He then made me write the PIP response for him which I did even though it was hard to find anything positive to say. Made me print off 4 copies to bring to the next review meeting. Forgot them so rang me and told me to send them to the HR person in charge of the PIP as he also forgot his laptop.

Needless to say, they realised that I was even being made write his PIP and he was managed out shortly after.

Oh yes lol

I was training new recruits about 18 months ago, and we had this one lady who said she was IT literate (you don't need to be a whizz, just basic knowledge of how to use email, teams and Adobe etc is fine) but she clearly wasn't lol. She said she had used Outlook in her last job, but I think she had been there for so long that she knew how to use it if it was EXACTLY the same, definitely don't ask her to do anything else though. She didn't know what I meant when I said to open a new tab in chrome, or what chrome was for that matter 😳. No idea how to use teams or how to combine documents in Adobe. It would take her all day to do work that my other trainee would do in a few hours.

The role is quite complex, so I knew within a few weeks that she just wasn't going to be suitable for this job at all. She left before her probation came around, as there's no way she would have passed it anyway.

However the absolute worst was someone who was unconsciously incompetent. You'd point out they'd done something incorrectly and they would argue their way was right. Despite it being obviously wrong to everyone e.g. writing a report in a conversational/informal style because the information had been given to them through conversations. They couldn't understand why they were supposed to write in a more formal style to report to the project board! Verbatim comments in quotation marks to illustrate your point, yes. Pages and pages of 'as if off the top of their head' prose didn't cut it. But they honestly wouldn't be told. I even went on a constructive feedback training session to improve how I gave the feedback (although none of the other project members struggled with my suggestions for improvements or development areas). But nope they wouldn't be told. They even did a personal performance review and gave themselves 10/10 for everything! I told them even I didn't get 10/10 on everything and they said maybe they should be the project manager then 🤣

The thing is, no one in their mid 40s or older would have grown up with a computer in the remotely modern sense of the word (might have had something like a Sinclair Spectrum if they grew up in the 80s) or had access to Excel at university.

Windows wasn't even installed on the office computers when I started work in the mid 90s. When I first saw Excel I didn't have a clue what it was for, it just looked like the computer equivalent of 'squared paper'. I have never received any formal training on Excel. I ended up buying 'Excel for Dummies' around Y2K to try to make sense of it, and taking the approach of asking people 'can you show me how to do that please'.

I'm still not great compared to many of the younger people - I often end up having to Google for step-by-step instructions on how to do things on Excel.

They even did a personal performance review and gave themselves 10/10 for everything! I told them even I didn't get 10/10 on everything and they said maybe they should be the project manager then 🤣

Lol this made me laugh more than anything else on this very funny thread! It sounds like something a five-year-old would do.

(Other highlights have been "sorry I can't come in today, it's too windy" and "why yes I'd love to work in your vegetable processing factory, just don't ask me to use a knife")

It's just not taught in schools as standard any more. I've added it to my scheme of work for year 13 - I don't teach IT but I've found a particular single lesson where I can work in most excel features. 17/18yo, selective school, and they don't even know how to click and drag to copy cells.

Secretary who couldn’t file… after a while we just got used to finding M under W…
she didn’t last her probation though

@Toberlerone

Oh i had one of those who was absolutely useless by far the weakest link in the team but self assessed himself as exceeding expectations in every category on his appraisal.

When we did his 1-2-1 he argued with everything we said, stood up from his chair and paced the room shaking his had shouting ‘unbelievable’ and accused us of prejudice and victimisation- because middle aged white men are obviously a marginalised minority 😫

The 1-2-1 scheduled for an hour lasted 3 and he refused to sign his appraisal and raised a grievance case to HR. Thankfully it went nowhere and even more thankfully he took voluntary redundancy the following year

About ten years ago, I worked as a consultant on a project with a government agency.

The experts were amazingly intelligent and driven people, but the attitude of some of the CS staff was unbelievable.

There was one woman in particular on the project team who was a 'lifer' - joined the CS at 16 and had been there ever since, getting slowly promoted over 20 years to a senior role. She openly admitted that she was only there for the pension.

She was genuinely one of the dullest, least motivated and downright dangerously incompetent people I've ever met and to this day, I am still utterly baffled by how she managed to get away with it.

surely this is just laziness and not anything to do with being a young person? you sound adultist.

A long long time ago (I would have been about 18) and managing a hotel restaurant. A woman slightly older than me was recruited. She genuinely thought that if she ran out of forks whilst laying up she could just use whatever was in her right hand instead - knives or spoons - rather than fetch more forks.

She was asked to refresh the bud vases on the tables and put out Budweisers.

She would regularly wear two left or two right shoes.

I think she lasted a week.

Too many over the years. We have a very attractive renumeration package so we do get the odd lazy, incompetent, tardy but smug one that's fallen through HR's recruitment cracks. Then it's up to my local management to try and whip them into shape, when really they shouldn't be in the job in the first place. They think yay! Paid well, do bugger all. It's very hard to fire them too, because we're heavily unionised.

Then again, I've made some atrocious mistakes and I think my managers (who unfortunately I get on well with) are too polite to say, actually, Sunflower, you fudged up. But I learn, or try to, from those incidents.

Had another one who strolled into work 2 hours late one day with the excuse he’d had to wait for the bookies to open and collect his winnings as he didn’t have enough money for his train fare otherwise

I’m 46 and have been using Mac computers since I was 3.

DH is 2 years older and studied computer science at uni in the 90s. He absolutely had a computer at home as a teen.

I did start a finance job in 2000 where the team were doing the sums on calculators and then entering the figures into massive excel spreadsheets. That was a £4bn public sector budget. You can imagine the revolution when in week 2 I set up formulas!

I find this a lot with men. I get partnered to work on something with a bloke who doesn't seem to know his arse from his elbow, then suddenly all over it when there's a promotable or profile-raising opportunity. Fuckers. 🤬🤬🤬