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Admin
Frist of all same story as other times
Admin
Once I was chatting over a beer with a man who had been running the "central team" at the company I worked at. Said "central team" were the ones responsible for the core software, as you would expect.
"So, Dave, what was your key mistake during your tenure?" I asked him.
"Yep, you got it," he said, understanding exactly what I meant, "picking Graham over you that time you both applied to join." He paused to reflect. "You have to admit, he did talk a good game."
Admin
How hard is it to set up an idiot like that to do something sackable? All you have to do is give them the rope, they're guaranteed to use it.
Admin
I see at least three things in this story that alone could be considered sackable offences.
How the hell did this Bart manage to keep his job for so long?
Admin
By bullshitting senior management. The same way any other incompetent moron who can talk a good game keeps their job. Usually, the non-technical senior management is even more clueless so a big bullshitter like Bart can easily keep them out of the loop except with what he tells them. So anyone with a clue will get fired because Bart will lie and place blame to remove obstacles, and since senior management trusts Bart they believe whatever he says without doing any fact-checking first; if Bart, who has been with the company for 20 years, says that Bill the new guy is causing trouble (by wanting to do things right but Bart won't say that, he'll say Bill is insubordinate or going behind his back), the big bosses will of course believe Bart and tell him get rid of this Bill guy.
Admin
The real WTF? It's not usually this blatant. People with 20 years' tenure in one job in IT / software have, in many cases, not kept up with the explosion of good new stuff generated by Moore's law. We're human; we do what we did last year because it worked for us last year. We all gotta keep learning.
Admin
To add onto what DocMonster says, it's an unfortunate culture in many companies where anyone in 'senior' or 'management' roles is automatically treated as if what they say is gospel, no matter how demonstrably wrong/incompetent they are.
Admin
Given how often "whom" (and "whomever", as here) is misused, I'm coming around to the idea that it should just be scrapped altogether.
Admin
In my career, I have worked with Bart - who used to be my boss. There was also Simon, Lee, Matt, Jeff, Melissa, and Ron. Each and every one of them was also Bart.
I recently read an article about the trend that has been running for quite some time that, if you are good at your job, you need to stay in your spot and keep doing it because nobody can do it as well as you do. Therefore, you never get the promotion. Instead, they put Bart in the big chair as the boss because they know you - being an excellent IT professional - will continue to keep things running as smoothly as you always have.
That article also said that, if the company can't easily cut Bart loose with clear-cut sackable offenses, it is better off promoting him. Either he will be better at the new job than he was at his old job, or he will mess up royally very quickly and the company will have good cause to "release him to elsewhere." Or, he can continue to slide by and eventually become CTO.
Admin
You know, Bananafish, it's a well-known phenomenon called The Peter Principle, named after Laurence J. Peter. He observed that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to their level of incompetence - that is, they keep doing well enough to get promoted to the point where they no longer do well.
Admin
Reminds me of my first boss-- he came in three times a week and sat at his desk reading the Wall Street Journal. Every month he would write a check to IBM for $110,000 in computer rental. Twice a year he would fly to some industry conference in the Bahamas. We basically ignored everything he said and he never noticed we just did rational things, a non-intersecting set with the set of his directives. Good times.
Admin
Bart defied the Peter Principle by continuing to rise past his level of incompetence to higher and even more lofty levels of incompetence.
The Peter Principle postulates a "competence ceiling". Bart shattered it, continuously, until the damage was too severe to contain and he had to go.
Admin
The Peter Principle is not applicable here: Bart got promoted way AFTER they found incompetent. Several times. Competence just isn't evaluated on promotions.
Admin
Close, but in this case they get promoted beyond their level of incompetence. In this, it's more like the Dilbert principle; idiots get promoted to get them out of the production environment.
Admin
Everyone knows that time is money and knowledge is power. With a little bit of physics, power is work/time. So...
money = work/knowledge
As knowledge approaches zero, money approaches infinity, regardless of work done. In this instance, knowledge tipped over into the negatives and all the money went away.
Admin
The name should have been a warning. But no, they hired him anyway, and now everyone is having a cow over the havoc he wreaks!