I agree with Manda JO in that the actual incidence of George Costanzas in the workplace is probably being exaggerated by an order of magnitude, at least. Just because you don’t understand what someone else does isn’t proof they do nothing.
Actually, TWO orders of magnitude. I’ve seen people who were clearly useless, but it wasn’t that they personally lacked skills; it was that they had been incorrectly hired, or misallocated, or the organized had changed in some way that what they were supposed to have been doing became pointless. Move them to another job in another company and they’d do fine, unlike George Costanza, who was useless at everything.
I’ve seen this backfire though. We acquired a company that had about twice the IT per employee headcount that we maintained. We axed the specialists and basically said that if it couldn’t be learned by two or more people it had to be replaced. It took a couple of years, but we got that group to be more productive and cost a lot less, while eliminating single points of failure.
As my VP used to say, “People get hit by buses. And data centers get shut down by hurricanes. We need to be able to work around either.”
When I worked at Prudential (very briefly about 20 years ago), we had team/group of women in the department like this. Best part was that we had monthly departmental awards for quality and morale and stuff like that, which their team organized and managed. They all just voted for each other and kept winning all of the awards. That were supposed to be for people who actually did stuff…
We had a bunch of IBM contractors there too. They managed to convince the VP to give them a locked room they could work out of and not allow anyone else into. Which only served to prevent people from learning that they were actually working on contracts for other companies while billing us. I never saw them actually produce a single piece of code for our department. And yet they were extremely successful in convincing our idiot VP that they needed MORE IBM consultants to help get the work done. While our programmers (of which I was one) sat on our hands.
I left after 6 months (as per my promise when I was hired - if the new project I’m being hired for isn’t providing me any work within 6 months, I’m gone.) The entire @120 person department was axed a few months later. (Vindication! :D)
There was one job I had where the guy a few cubes away supposedly was there to write process and policy documents for our various endeavors. The thing was that I never saw any of those documents and couldn’t have told you what most of the policies were, because they were irrelevant to the way things worked there. The documents were being drawn up so that we could win or keep one of those certifications that say that you run your business really well. The documents were filed by number and never used - things just kept on going the way they had been going.
You said “corporate America,” but if I may say so, George Costanzas don’t seem too hard to find in government work and in the Armed Forces. A soldier I know broke down for me how he did 15 minutes of work per week, and spent the rest of the time watching television. Another told me that when he was in the Army (I’m not sure how many years before) the majority of his working day was spent at the bowling alley. I’m not saying it’s the norm, but it does seem more prevalent than in the private sector.
George’s mom was right - he should have gotten a civil service job!
About 14-15 years ago I did a short contract stint for a state agency. The guy we were supposed to get directions from was quite literally Retired In Place. He didn’t do a goddamned thing and everyone knew it. Every time we needed something, we had to ask him, watch him not answer, go back to our desks, wait a suitable amount of time, tell the manager we needed the answer, tell her yes, we spoke to RIP’er, then wait for her to find someone else who could help us. Or more likely, just live without it. We didn’t end up accomplishing anything in the end because we had no resources to give us anything.
When my sister took over as supervisor of her city department, she had two people effectively Retired In Place. Took her a couple of years, but she eventually managed to get rid of them. One she got to quit, the other ended up being transferred to someplace else.
When I took over as supe for the unit I was hired for, I had a RIP as well. She’d been with the county for nearly 30 years and was supposed to be my “lead” worker (the subject matter expert that my workers could go to). She was completely useless. She had mounds upon piles upon heaps of paperwork spilling out and around her cubicle walls, was complety ineffective as a leader within the unit (workers had long grown accustomed to going around her and seeking assistance elsewhere) and clearly had huge attendance issues that had previously gone unchallenged because she didn’t do any actual work when she was there anyway. For a time, I was doing her job and mine, and to make matters worse, due to her longevity, she was making more money than me. Her boss.
And that was an impetus for me to strip her off all the easy clerical duties that her previous boss had assigned to her, and assign them back to the clerks. I assigned her a full caseload,stripped her of lead worker duties, started requiring doctor notes for so much as 5 minutes of unplanned time off, met with her twice a week to discuss performance issues, documented everything and followed up with an email to her of every conversation, assigned tasks and gave her set deadlines and THEN followed up to ensure she met them, and was on the verge of putting her on a performance improvement plan when she suddenly decided to retire. It took six months, and it was a hell of a lot of work on my part.
When she retired, my manager and I celebrated.
As an aside, the position became open because she pressured the previous supervisor so much about not addressing performance issues that he moved to another area.
It’s a little different in the military. Most of it exists in case of things that don’t happen very often, and when those things don’t happen at all it’s natural that there won’t be much for them to do.
Really? George had a shelf made under his desk..so he could sleep in his office! The episode where George Steinbrenner’s grandkids come in (and wake him up) was hilarious!
