In the early part of this year, I had to fire a guy for chronic timekeeping problems, failure to perform and repeated extension of deadlines, persistent skirting of protocols and dishonesty.
I found out recently through the grapevine that he did exactly the same with a previous employer and has done the same again with two more since.
I guess that makes it pretty much a pathology for him - I wondered if anyone else has seen anything like it elsewhere.
The pattern was always pretty much like this:
Promise to do something, to an agreed timescale.
All the way up to the deadline, offer assurance that it’s all going perfectly to plan.
At the very last minute, announce that there is a serious technical problem. Ask for another half a day.
At the end of the new deadline, ask for another couple of days.
At the end of this period, ask for another week.
(At each and every time the deadline is extended, conspicuously relax the pace - ie. Finish work early and go out drinking)
When the point is reached where no further extension is possible and things get serious, go off sick, but promise to work from home
Keep issuing more and varied excuses, keep nibbling away at final deadlines.
Finally, when everyone’s patience is worn to the bone and the hammer falls, express surprise and indignation at the impatience of those who eventually drew the line.
The oddest thing about it all is the last bit. After literally weeks of incremental chipping away at deadlines, and escalating tension, it always seems to end up with the guy complaining “I don’t understand why you’re being so mean! I only needed to extend the (last) deadline by a few hours! I was just about to finish it!”
Of course there was never even very much evidence that he had even started.
Yeah. You should see a history of it. It’s not the guy you say never finishes anything, he actually does finish some things, mainly he gets distracted or has some anxiety issues. Nope, this guy never gets started, he’s all talk. It might escalate, out of the blue someone will steal his computer, or break into his car and steal his papers, or something like that. Makes you wish you still had the guy who never finished things.
Financially, the guy is a disaster, and he is now being pursued by a string of serious debts (which is part of the reason I got to hear that the behaviour was repeating).
He’d be on the hook for repaying some debt or other, so would borrow money from others (or get an advance on his pay), saying he needed it to repay the other debt, then spend the money on something else (alcohol, tobacco, entertainment, etc) - giving a string of delay excuses to his initial creditor.
I have seen this in cases involving technical work where the person is incapable of actually performing the work required, but only discovers this when they are already too far into the project to admit it (due, perhaps, to some early procrastination, or just overconfidence in their own abilities).
In one instance, I was brought in after this person was finally fired and reviewed the work he had done. He had fundamentally misunderstood a key aspect of the technology and his entire approach was unworkable as a result.
Your entire description of the situation, including the financial difficulties, is dead-on.
Dude’s an alcoholic. He’s still got enough savvy to get a job, but he can’t cope with actually doing it in any real way. The debt, the denial, it’s a familiar pattern.
After I fired him, loads of people at my workplace turned out to have lent him money - nobody knew anyone else had, and in several cases, he had borrowed the same amount from two different people at once, with the same story of why it was needed.
Yeah, I knew this guy. He was a big talker. Actually talked his way into a sweet promotion at the first company where I knew him, and then he got nothing done and blamed it all on his team. They “loved” him, as you can imagine. He’d go into management meetings and sell them the moon, with no understanding of how the work was actually going to get done.
He showed up at my next company, and it was the same story. He got passed around from team to team for years. I can only imagine the back room dealings that went on to get those hand offs accomplished. He finally ended up in “special projects” and got RIF-ed.
“All hat and no cattle”, was the best description I ever heard for the guy.
But, when I was the (expensive) ‘Hired Gun’ brought in to clean up the mess, I was quite thankful that such people existed and found (alleged) work in my field.
The first job - he promised that he could deliver all the requirements in a short period.
Delivered nothing. This was a payroll issue - people had been promised money.
In 1992, we cut payroll using a floppy and a ‘hip pocket’, non-production program somebody happened to have had over on the test system.
Second job: I had to tell him the ‘Package Numbers’ for the SCM system which held his software (Changeman).
He refused to sign off on the packages to allow them in production. At least he was honest - the system was nOT ready for production.
The User demanded the system be installed. The first night, it produced ledgers to cut checks ($6,000,000.00 in checks) to the WRONG payees.
When I left a few weeks later, the ‘system’ was still on manual hold by the scheduler software.
I knew a guy whose wife was a world class procrastinator. She never got around to divorcing him during the five years he was in prison. She never got around to divorcing him when she moved to another state. She never got around to divorcing him when she started dating a new dude. She never got around to divorcing him when she bought a house and moved in with new dude. She finally contacted him about four months before she was supposed to marry new dude. The husband wished her well, told her to send the paperwork and he would sign. She never got around to sending it. The marriage to new dude happened and as far as I know she never did get around to divorcing husband number 1.
This is chilling, because this would be me if I’d never learned to compensate for my ‘issues’.
I read these stories, and I feel like I dodged a very destructive bullet. I wish these procrastinators could see that if they faced the reasons they act this way, they might just end up as productive people.
I employed a guy who was just like that - he came with good references but didn’t often deliver. All sorts of excuses. I’m pretty sure he had alcohol issues, as well. I helped him out to start with because I thought he needed a bit of guidance to get going, but it ended up with me doing most of his job (as well as mine). I quickly found a reason to ensure that his contract wasn’t renewed.
He always managed to talk the talk to some of the management, though, and moved on to another role where I didn’t have to deal with him.
Another guy I worked with also took forever to deliver on relatively simple tasks. Nothing was ever his fault. Eventually he “hurt his leg” playing lunchtime football with our colleagues, went off on sick leave for months (we suspected he found a dodgy doctor to sign off the medical certificates), finally got told he had to come back or get fired, and eventually got internally transferred off site to somewhere else. No-one missed him.
Of course, my wife says she married someone like that
I do sometimes find it hard to get started on projects round home, particularly if I am not confident about the DIY aspects - I’m not great with my hands, and I have issues when I have to ask a professional for help. So I sort of get how that sort of procrastination works, but I don’t let it stop me - once I have figured out how to start, I get on with it.
In my working life, I have never had any issues with performance and delivery. Even when I can’t hit a deadline, I’ll have a valid, provable reason why, and I will have worked as hard as possible to pull back any overrun.
A friend of mine had something like this happen. It was with a graphic designer who was hired. He was a nice guy and very personable with a good sense of humor. Came across like a guy you’d want to work with. He would be involved in all the meetings and when the project got heated and there was a real deadline which had to be met, he would call in sick. The work would then get assigned to someone else, because it had to be done. He would return days later as if nothing was wrong. He did this a couple of times, and the last time he did it, he didn’t even call in each day to say if he was still out sick. He called in sick for Monday and then didn’t call back into work until next Monday. When he called in the following Monday, my friend said the firs thing this guy said on the phone is “I guess I’m fired?”. He was fired.
It’s one thing to be out sick, because we can never know what is going on in other people’s lives, but employers expect you to notify them if you aren’t coming back in. It might appear he was fired because he took a lot of sick days, but it was because he didn’t check in with them. He didn’t even try to explain anything and came in to be fired. My friend said they never found out what his situation really was, except that the boss who hired this guy did say after he was gone, that when he checked with the former employer during the hiring process they said he did good work but had a problem with absenteeism. For some reason, the hiring manager decided to disregard that concern.
I’ve personally seen people not get work done at all blaming it on anything they could. Lack of computing resources, no documentation, someone was to get back to them and didn’t, etc. Management can see through these things. You don’t win any points for having excuses for not getting things done.
Substance abuse may (probably) is involved. However, the borrowing money part of it tells me it’s a lifestyle, that’s a game he’s probably played a number of times before, and is ongoing right now. My observation is that people learn those tricks pretty early in life and from watching others work the small time and short cons.
