Let's bitch about our stupid, annoying co-workers

I mean I've done a ton of them but it's been a while and they aren't the most intuitive thing in the world (for me, anyway) and if someone asked me to do them again I'd be like, you're gonna need to give me a day or two to refresh myself before I take that on there chief. Dude's chutzpah severely outpaced him there, I feel.

I'm kind of an asshole but I would've just sent him a screenshot of google with "how to do a v-lookup" in the search box.

my favoured solution for that type of assholery is http://bfy.tw/DSmc

ha!

Okay, that's definitely preferable to stewing in frustration until my jugular ruptures.

tbh I'm not that good at hiring and unfortunately neither have my previous managers been, this job is the first one I've had to be involved with hiring, and our track record has been hit and miss. The last 2 people I was more involved with hiring and have turned out to be mostly OK, the guy we hired before that I don't really know how he managed to blag through the interview, we had 2 candidates shortlisted, and they both did basically the same on technical questions, although I thought the other guy had the edge, but the one we hired had an outgoing personality so the non-technical director liked him better. He turned out to be pretty junior level and needs a lot of help, still after being here 18 months he infuriates me with his basic incompetence on a regular basis. I insisted we put a code test back in after him because we used to do that and they dropped it for that position for some reason.

I have also been v tempted to send him lmgtfy links

i'm tempted to send lmgtfy links pretty much on a daily basis

I get distressed by people who can't figure out stuff on their own when there is the internet and instead waste other peoples' time. Hiring anyone is pretty hit or miss, I've wanted to sneakily even give people writing tests in interviews just to obtain coherency and professionalism levels.

That's not a bad idea. We received some phishing alert recently which warned, among other things, against opening attachments in emails containing misspellings and poor grammar. Which I took as tacit permission to delete 90% of the work emails I receive in a day. Really lightened my load!

We used to have so many poorly constructed and tonally semi-offensive emails sent out that I had to write template emails for my team to use because they couldn't be trusted. I am so happy not to work in an office right now.

the reason this dude in particular had been hired was a professed proficiency with v-lookups

please tell me more about this job because I think this might be my only skill

(I mean, I'm kidding, but I'm also kind of not kidding, so I am curious what jobs would have this high up their hiring criteria - though maybe it is a financial job in which case, nope, better not)

Plus he put Esq. after everything

reminds me of a coworker who was relatively competent but insisted on being overbearing and explaining exactly how software should be developed, not just explaining requirements, to the actual developers

he had several accreditations and degrees in his field, which was definitely not software. perpetually incapable of staying in his lane. only person i've worked with who had "PhD in blah, Certified blah" in his email signature

he formerly taught at a university and I can only imagine what it was like to be a student. or maybe i know, because he sat in my cube instructing me multiple times

Okay so the example that spurred my revive: there was this situation that was nuanced and might have been handled in a variety of ways which I would've discussed with others in (that one guy)'s position before making a decision about how to proceed but, because I knew I would get effing nowhere with that approach, I made an executive decision and just told him to let this party outside of the company know that we couldn't do the thing they were requesting of us. Any of the others in his position would have known that my email was intended for his eyes only and would have tailored a response for this outside party, but he opted to just forward my email to them (thankfully I omitted any sensitive information). When he finally gets a response from the outside party, he didn't manage to forward their response to me (which I predicted, because he's a fuckup) but rather to the person who initially alerted me to and had no hand in resolving the issue in question (a person whose opinion of (that one guy) was once benign and uncolored by regular interaction with him but who, in conversation about this matter, referred to him unguardedly as 'that asshole').

a passing spacecadet - lots of jobs involved with operations and feeds and distribution and things like that rely on someone to do the vlookups and reconcile everything

a passing spacecadet: yes, it was in the finance department of the company in question, but I also worked in that department and am as dumb as the dumbest of posts wrt matters of finance. I think one continual lesson of this thread is 'never sell yourself short'.

the peter principle is real, folks

It's kind of weird how much vlookups are needed but I consider it basic excel. If that was a prime qualification of a job I would want someone to at least be intermediate to advanced excel so they can at least deal with spreadsheets coming from multiple sources.

(By way of contrast, I was temp-to-hire at my current job and was asked about a month in if I knew how to do v-lookups and said I'd done them a couple times before and would figure it out and I did and I did them regularly and remained a temp for another eleven months.)

I think a great deal of professional success is predicated upon bullshitting and gladhanding and I'm an epic failure at both of those things so my facility wrt any other skillset is ultimately kinda beside the point.

thanks all btw!

I guess I do something kind of related to "operations and feeds and distribution" (my job title contained 1 of those words and a near-synonym of another until we all got re-titled to something generic) but the nice thing about my particular job is that it's not a major problem, or at least generally not my fault, if not everything reconciles at the end

the thought of being relied on to make everything add up monetarily or process-wise is a little daunting, which is half of why I said "not finance", along with, well, not knowing anything about finance/accounting

basically I want a job where they pay me not to be accountable for anything meaningful at all, which I admit is not a very lucrative line of work for yr average joe or spacecadet

Don't let it being in finance stop you. Most places' IT and operations are a total mess and are in a neverending backlog of reconciliation anyway.

if someone in IT insists that a system will be perfect and never need reconciliation, they are a horrible liar

Okay, okay. This very minute, (that one guy) forwarded an email to just me but wrote a response in the email intended for the sender (and ftr, I guarantee he doesn't understand how bcc works, so that isn't what's happening here). I could honestly pop in here many times on any given day to just bitch about this dude.

my newest boss couldn’t figure out how to copy paste an element within a powerpoint. we use powerpoint day in day out for briefings etc. lord give me strength

i had to tell someone what a link was once.

they were working on selling ads for a website.

like a cyberlink?

I lost my rag in a meeting with aforementioned coworker yesterday after he was failing to answer what I thought was a fairly simple question and exasperatedly asked him "do you know what HTML is?" then I realised I wasn't helping matters so I calmed down a bit. but seriously I don't know what to do with him sometimes

I know I have mentioned this before but I had to teach T3ddy Roosevelt IV how to doubleclick. I guess his assistant usually handled his mouse.

I feel like my general expectation of coworkers (possess a basic understanding of your responsibilities and the tools you need to do your job and then just actually, like, do your job) is such a ridiculously low bar that most people would be likely to clear it almost by accident. And yet. And yet.

lol Yerac

xp I'm in the same boat - I don't expect people to be able to do everything, I'm happy to pick up all the complicated things, but to have to do all the complicated things *and* help idiots do ridiculously basic tasks all the fucking time as well is just too much sometimes

I suggested to management I sit with him and do pair programming or give him training courses to work through but they shot it down saying it would take up too much time, never mind that my time is constantly wasted and interrupted, but unfortunately complete inability to do your job is also a problem with management at this godforsaken company of morons

I feel like my general expectation of coworkers (possess a basic understanding of your responsibilities and the tools you need to do your job and then just actually, like, do your job) is such a ridiculously low bar that most people would be likely to clear it almost by accident. And yet. And yet.

unbelievably, all of the programmers I work with (10 ppl) are competent engineers and communicators. Everybody just ... does their work. Bumps in the road are handled in level-headed and efficient meetings. I really lucked out, I am so grateful to work with these people. now clients, on the other hand...

I like dealing with just programmers. I hate managing or clients or the general employee population so I once had a job create me a role where I just dealt with programmers. It was awesome.

it would take up too much time

more than nearly any other factor, I'm incredibly grateful whenever I'm working with people that understand investing a reasonable amount of time in something now will result in fewer headaches... from now until infinity

Y'all extolling the virtues of programmers clearly don't work for my company. Just reminded today that some supergenius has recently set up an autoreplace in the primary piece of (proprietary, and it shows) software we use such that every typed apostrophe is swapped out with a grave accent, thus rendering our already unwieldy and damn near inoperable search function even moreso (ie every search for let's say 'Joe's Diner' turns up zero results even if there were a hundred instances of 'Joe's Diner' entered into our database).

Oh, they jack up stuff all the time but they are easier to deal with on a day to day basis. Maybe because all the programmers I have ever had to deal with were in the UK or Budapest.

Yeah, generally and in other workplaces I agree with that more sanguine assessment. The magnitude of the jacking up here (see f'rinstance: hours-long mid-day outages on a regular basis, wherein hundreds of people are left twiddling their collective thumbs while collecting a paycheck) would be a fireable offense pretty much anywhere else I'd worked.

I worked in a company of thousands that wouldn't be able to execute trades because of some issue. No one would be fired.

The bar is always a lot lower than you would think.

I have a coworker who started here within the past year after previously working on software for high frequency trading. There are some stories, although most of them involve clients who insisted they wanted software that did specific things, despite being told they were bad ideas. I think at least one of these ideas got trading suspended in a major exchange until the program was turned off.

high frequency trading markets are a bad idea

>at least one of these ideas got trading suspended in a major exchange until the program was turned off.

i know nothing about the world of finance and markets etc – but i feel like this would be a huge deal.

you would be surprised!
https://www.sec.gov/litigation/suspensions.shtml

wait, I take that back -- it was likely a trading halt, which is different and even more common

My colleague was reprimanded by HR for ignoring the rules: she always takes days off on weekends (busiest days). Lol. I laugh but it results in more work for me. Grrrr.

coffee in one hand, suddenly remember that you need your pass to get through the security gates and start scrabbling for it in your pocket with your free hand. maybe don't do this whilst INSIDE the revolving doors.

an incident has erupted after someone wrote a page on the work wiki which says at the top "THIS IS A DRAFT - PLEASE ADD COMMENTS, CORRECTIONS, ETC." and someone edited it

oh no, now page editor #2 has left the room and everyone else is being asked for opinions i.e. to take sides

you did the right thing in going online

I was just enjoying the swing from "please edit this page" to "how dare anyone edit this page"

a distraction has been found in the form of something else to get wound up about, fortunately (?)