If I had written this last week, I would have put it in the Pit. Now I’m just bemused and wondering what’s up with him.
I have a coworker, let’s call him F. for Flameboy. F. and I are in the same department, and we’re friends of a casual sort, but I’d never worked with him. I’ve used code he’s written, and it’s perfectly competent, and he’s managed multiple projects, and I get the sense he used to work very hard.
Lately, something seems to have happened to him, though. About a month ago, F. was put in charge of writing a report, and I was to write some subsidiary material for him. He dithered about, either saying he didn’t know what to do or simply not being available until right before the deadline, at which point I ended up telling him exactly what to do while writing more than the material I’d originally been slated to do. He didn’t do what I asked. I kept asking him to do less and less (going from “Write this section” to “Flesh out these notes I’ve taken on this section” to “Make this table to put in this section”) until I just gave up and wrote the entire rest of it myself this past weekend, when I had lots of other things I would have preferred to do.
This week, the second in command to our boss, M., needed some of the material from this report for a task he was doing for Boss under severe time pressure, and asked F. to take the report and cut it down to a smaller size. M. also asked F. to put together some information from our database. I estimate that it would take me (and I am not particularly fast) 3 hours to do this if I stopped to check the Dope and wrote some posts along the way. It took a day and a half for F. to do this.
Okay, so, screwing me over (I wish, given that he was not going to do a freaking thing on the report, that he had at least told me in advance instead of leaving me to figure it out) was bad enough for him, as there are a couple of people in leadership positions who have probably read between the lines (e.g., they are probably wondering why I went to talk to them about material for the report instead of F.). But screwing over M. was a really dumb move. M. is a super nice guy, and he hates to say anything bad about anybody, but a) I’m not going to complain to our boss, since that looks like I’m whining “Oh, why did F. get to be in charge of the report and not me?” but M. has no such problems, and b) the fact that M. never says anything bad about anyone means that if he says anything even slightly negative about F., which I think he will (M. sounded pretty frustrated with him at the last meeting we had), it will sound really bad.
Have you seen people just undermining themselves like this after years of competency? I’ve never seen anything quite like this before. F. doesn’t have any big stress in his life or anything. Well, he recently turned 40; maybe that has something to do with it?