Enjablog

This has been an insightful week for me. Chad2 (previously NewGuy) and I have bonded over the annoying incompetence of the newbies.

He is sharing an office with our dept intern and I have been working on training up a new hire. I’m also trying to move away from the New Guy/Newer Guy naming convention because I recognize the inherent flaws in the system. (Sorry, NewGirl, you’re getting grandfathered in.) So… I’m still working on a name for this guy. I’m thinking ResumeLiar is too judgmental. Like I said, still working…

ResumeLiar doesn’t seem to understand how to utilize email. He’ll email me asking me to tell him when I’m free. I respond with, “What do you need?” 1) So I can be prepared. 2) So I can allocate a sufficient amount of time for whatever it is he needs to know that I’m free for. His response? Walk over to ask me in person for something to do. Well, if you had told me that in the email, I could’ve spent 5 minutes putting something together for you to do and then talked to you. Instead, you can stand there and wait.

And yes, even though I’m putting these files in the same folder I’ve put everything else for you, I will send you an email with a link to where things are posted. Stop asking me to do the same task over and over. I get it. You’re incapable of figuring out that I’m going to put the stability files in the stability folder. I will send you the link like I have twice a day for the past 3 weeks that you have worked here.

Then there was the task I had him work concurrently with me because there was an issue that was bottlenecking the remainder of the calcs that needed to be run. And he comes in the next day asking if I got it to work. Yes. “Oh, can I see it? I couldn’t get it to work.” Hm. Well, did you try? “Well, they kept failing, so I stopped running cases.” And then what did you do with the other 8 hours of the day? The goal here is to make it not fail. Of course what you started with failed.

So, I’m going to give you my calcs and then expect an independent review back? Right. Why don’t I explain it again in simpler steps and you make an attempt at learning how to do this? I’ll take responsibility for not being a good teacher if you take responsibility for being slow.

Now, to be fair, he has shown signs of being useful. He found a couple errors when he did QA for some of my stuff last week. Slow, but diligent. I don’t think he has a grasp of any of the concepts, but he can push buttons in the right order when given detailed instructions and is reminded to follow ALL steps listed. I can build on that.

Lesson 3: If you lower your standards enough, there is a positive side to everything!

QoTD: “I can explain it again, but I can’t comprehend it for you.”