In the old Seinfeld show, George is an interesting character…he lands jobs where he has no idea what he is supposed to be doing…but he is rescued by the fact that his bosses are equally incompetent dolts.
I noticed this as well in my own career…but ever since the 2008 crash, companies are very careful who they hire.
So, could a “George Costanza” type dufus ever get hired today?
Or is the bar so much higher, that this type would never get in the door?
They are still out there. I am basically the day to day head of IT for a large manufacturing facility for a huge and extremely famous company but lots of other people that have never even stepped foot in place have authority over some of it as well.
We had a guy who showed up one day saying that he worked in IT and he was sent to us to ‘take care of things’ even though he had no discernible skills. That sent up red flags to me immediately but he had the proper paperwork and high level manager authorizations. I made some phone calls and it all checked out so we gave him a shared office away from everyone else because there was no way he was touching anything important. I tried to find out what his job was supposed to be for a couple of months and that was completely unsuccessful.
Someone in corporate signed an expensive contract and this guy had to be onsite to fulfill it even though he had nothing whatsoever to do and it was better for everyone if he wasn’t allowed to touch anything at all. He tried to fake it by yelling at some unknown person over the phone whenever people walked by (probably no one in reality) and he complained about vague things a lot whenever he came out of his office but no work was ever done.
It took literally 18 months of me and my boss complaining to get his contract cancelled and have him removed but he was riding the George Costanza gravy train the whole time.
The last company I worked for hired an incident manager (another IT job) who was completely incompetent. Nice, but a cardboard cutout of Darth Vader would have been more productive. She lasted six months
You might want to rephrase this. 
I think it’s pretty common for an employee to get lost in the crowd of other employees, just depends on the quality of their supervisor. Of course in some offices you have more than one supervisor of equal standing which seems like it would complicate things greatly.
Costanza-like uselessness was on it’s way out years before the Seinfeld episode, and even more so in the current economic environment. However, George was a particularly egregarious instance. There are still companies that maintain unproductive employees, though usually it’s loyalty to someone who had made valueable contributions in the past. You can probably find companies or particular managers that for various reasons don’t like to fire people and maintain some total losers for no reason, but in the modern corporate world this can be a sign of mismanagement that leads to dissolution or takeover before long, and when companies are taken over, there’s usually a purge of the deadwood, and the fauxwood that was never alive in the first place.
Based on my experience in the industry I work in, if people were actually productive and did their jobs (most especially the people “in charge”) we’d have a national unemployment rate of around 50%.
This is my experience, too, but unlike George Costanza, who just didn’t do anything, the lazy people around here find tonnes of “look busy” activities: Long e-mail chains discussing “issues”, pointless data collected into pointless spreadsheets and plotted in meaningless graphs, &c.
Don’t forget the meetings to plan other meetings.
Um… that stuff you described IS “work”. What do you think people do in an office all day?
Unless you have tangible performance metrics like sales quotas or billable hours or you work on something that everyone will notice if you stopped working on it (like the email servers go down or packages don’t get shipped), there are a lot of people in a office, especially at the middle levels, who don’t really do anything.
I got hired by an insurance company once time to be a “strategy manager” in some back office operations and IT group. That in and of itself is pretty nebulous. And given that my boss quit the day after I started, his boss was a crazy recluse who never left her office until she was “retired”, nobody knew what, if anything, I did all day.
Heck, my last job was as a contractor PM for an analytics team of like 100 people in another huge insurance company. I know my manager didn’t do anything. I’m sure the cute girls who were “directors of communication” or whatever did jack shit besides plan happy hours or act as glorified admins or hosts during executive conferences. When my contract ended, my fellow PMs who were full time told me I was the only one who actually had a project to work on for the past year.
How…how do these people not go crazy? Yeah, my work can be repetitive and boring and if I get one more stupid email from a stupid user, I will kick a nun but the few times I legitimately had no work to do and was merely manning the phone, I was bored sick in 45 minutes.
Should have brought in Chad Vader.
I was hired for a job back in 1997 to replace a woman who literally left me with something like 30 000 undelivered commodity contracts [I used to be the USDA coordinator in a food service company - these were food items for schools, penal and ‘home’ food services to use to feed their inhabitants.] So in addition to taking the current orders, I had to get them all of their back product as well. It took me something like 9 months to get everything delivered [either the destination had limited refrigeration space or with schools they closed over the summer and could not take product because they shut down the refrigeration over the summer]
I always felt like suggesting to some of them that they take the product and black market it to someone just to get it off their files.
A few years back, a friend of mine worked for Bank of New York. There was a joke in the office that one day, founder Alexander Hamilton told his staff “I have to go take care of this Burr business. No one do anything until I get back.”
I actually started a thread about my boring insurance company job and a lot of people were like “that sounds like the best job ever”! I like having down time as much as the next person, but having weeks or months with no real work to do is nerve wracking.
In consulting firms, we call it “being on the beach” (some places call it the “bench”). It means you don’t have any billable client work to do so you just sit around bored or doing bullshit work like helping the admin file or write sales proposals. It’s especially nervewracking because after some period of time, the firm might fire you if they can’t find work for you to do.
One thing I had heard about IBM’s consulting arm was that most people worked from home and your manager might even be in another state. It sounds great at first, but it can become really easy to get disconnected from the company.
Conspicuously bad, yet friendly? 
Yeah, we’ve got a bunch of them around here. They’re known as “business development coordinators” and various bullshit titles like that.
I don’t know what they do, except generate monstrous amounts of (non-billable) work for me as they demand endless revisions to pointless PowerPoint presentations that no one is ever going to see, and then write style guides for their pointless documents, and have like a dozen meetings a week in which they decide that their current PowerPoint presentation just doesn’t “pop” enough and send it off to our poor document services people with instructions to basically write it for them and find graphics and do god knows what.
And yes, they plan happy hours and act as admins or hostesses for conferences and meetings. And then write a newsletter about themselves and their department and how much work they do.
I don’t think it will ever go away, and it is a function of the economy, in addition to the traditional cultures of the organizations. The person doesn’t necessarily have to be incompetent. It’s just that when a company is flush with cash, and if the oversight is tied in with the operation, there will be a culture of inflated salaries.
If fact, my personal observation–anecdotal though it be–is that a lot of unemployed people right now were making large salaries in such organizational cultures. They weren’t always incompetent. They just didn’t really develop any real skills that made as valuable as their pay would lead one to believe. They got paid a lot because they were in the system of a particular industry, which was cronyistic. They knew the right people.
Then the economy fell, and they had to be laid off. These people now are trying to land jobs now expecting the same kind of money they made before, without any real naturalized skills. They refuse to take a “pay cut,” even though they don’t really have skills which reflect the kind of pay they want, and the industries they were in have disappeared or changed significantly.
That is true but generalized skills will not cut it anymore at least for the high salary positions. You have to be hyper-specialized. If you send out a resume saying that you are an expert in Marketing!, you will get few calls and probably at a crap job at the end. OTOH, if you know everything there is to know about the current marketing databases, you will get a nice job in the 6 figures. It is all about specialization.
I currently consult for an extremely large company that everyone has heard of and they put me through two years of training to do what I do. I am the only person in the world that can do my job as demonstrated by the disaster that happens every time I go on vacation. They have to pay dearly for that privilege and everyone should use hyperspecialization like that as a lever to make sure that they are fire-proof. It took me a very long time to learn that but it is true. The goal to be successful isn’t about work ethic or teamwork, it is about knowing what nobody else can do.
It’s not like the Peter Principle has gone away. And when there’s an incompetent boss, incompetent workers are hired. We had some consultants come in to oversee our department; their leader was completely unable to handle things (he was even incompetent at sucking up to his bosses). Luckily, he didn’t hire too many new people.
Not to be all Pollyanna, but there are cases where what someone does is not obvious, but it is important. I’m a teacher, which is a different sort of job, but I think if anyone else were to describe what they think I do in a day–my students or my co-workers–they would miss about half of it, because they only ever see the finished product: when shit just works, people get used to it, and they tend to vastly, vastly underestimate the time it takes to maintain it.
I can’t tell you how many should-have-been-successful things I’ve seen collapse and be dismissed as a bad idea because no one was willing to designate the manpower needed to make them work. We had a fantastic student-support class thing going at my school. It took a group of 12 of us meeting once a week to develop and maintain it, but once it was up and going, it was like 'Why are we meeting just to meet? It’s working fine!" and the administration more or less abandoned it to run on autopilot. The whole thing quickly fell apart into uselessness and then it was 'Oh, this is such a waste of time! Why did we ever start this program!"
Everyone notices innovation. But current programs take maintenance, and maintenance takes time. But it can be hard for outsiders to see how Bob screwing around at his desk all day leads to the never having to worry about warehouse space running out.