The Young and the Stupid

About six months ago we hired a kid [John] just out of college to work on our team. As it stands John only has two dedicated projects that he works on each week. One project takes about four hours – I know this for a fact since it used to be a part on my job prior to him joining us. He turns this in after two days and usually after 5:00 p.m. The second project has been due for about one month and he still hasn’t turned it in or provided anyone with an update.

When he had just started I worked on part of project one with him and then handed it over to him completely after a few weeks. A month later he was in our manager’s office having a chat about how work was going. I didn’t mean to but I did manage to overhear him saying that he will be more effective if things went back to the way they were and I helped him. I swear I almost fell out of my chair. I think it would have gone over better if he had asked to be ridden. Thankfully our boss said no that the project was his responsibility and not mine.

On Tuesday afternoon he handed in his weekly project, copied in our group president and vice president. The email started with ‘hey.’ Is it just me or is ‘hey’ a little too informal to use in business correspondences especially when addressing senior members of staff? Moving right along I opened the PowerPoint presentation which was attached. On some of the charts there were heavy lines and thin lines. The thin lines were ones that he had added and didn’t bother to standardize them. The bar at the bottom of some slides had dates going in all different directions and what’s worse there were lines with the same colour representing different companies. The whole thing was sloppy.

Here’s the kicker, I get the impression that he believes if he doesn’t do the things that he doesn’t like doing that he won’t have to do them. By handing in his assignment in two days instead of four hours that it will be handed back to me. And that by not even doing project two our boss will believe that he’s extremely busy and not give him anymore work or hand that project off to someone else as well.

To top it off, he’s expecting a big bonus and a nice sized raise. I think someone has to tell him that bonuses and raises are based on performance. Oh if I can be a fly on the wall during his review.