I have a coworker (fairly recently hired) who is doing some incompetent work. It started last week, when one of the project managers assigned him a task that he did wrong. It was screenshot captures of a client’s application for their documentation. It was due monday morning, and friday afternoon he asked me if I could spend an hour or two putting some final touches on them, resizing & adding circles, because he doesn’t know his way around photoshop. I handle all graphic design/manipulation, layout, desktop publishing, etc. for our company.
When I open the files, I find that they are, well, wrong. Wrong resolution, cropped wrong, wrong screens, not what the client requested, with fake content that was obviously fake, showing real email addresses. . . it needed to be done over from scratch. Only, being friday afternoon, there was no way to get access to the client’s app and make the deadline.
I talked to the PM, and ended up spending the entire weekend heavily photoshoping these files. The PM then spoke to this guy, and I spoke to this guy, and tried to stress that his errors had almost cost us the deadline, and that it had cost me my weekend (time which we couldn’t bill the client for, obviously). He’s new, so we wanted to provide feedback and some level of the benefit of doubt.
Now, he’s working with another PM, more screenshots. Again, it lands on my desk with no warning. Again, all screwed up-- some of them were in the wrong operating system, even. This time I can have them recaptured. They come back mislabled and mislocated and I send them back yet again, before I get them correct. I find out he told them PM that I would take care of them, fix any mistakes, and re-capture any that were wrong. . . without telling me that he’d said this (or, even, asking me to do it)
There was another batch that needed to be captured today, and both the PM and I were VERY explicit about exactly what he needed to do, and how they needed to look. We questioned him about taking them-- did he have any problems? Anything he needed help with? Did he check them? Yeah, yeah, everything’s fine.
So I open up the file and. . . surprise. . . they’re wrong. Now I’m dealing with things I can’t fix, because there are instances of things in the wrong language. All I got from him was, “Yeah, I don’t know why that’s like that.” What, a magic pixie put it in there?
“You can fix it, right? With photoshop?” ARGHHHH.
I have never tattled on anyone before, but I need to go talk to our boss. I am very nervous about this. I’m not a manager, and I hate confrontation. I’m pretty pissed right now, and I feel like I’m going to come off as whining, because he is particularly screwing me. I want to ask the other PMs not to give him any more graphic work, and send it through me instead, but I know I need to talk to our boss before doing that. My boss, however, really likes this guy and it may not go over well.
On the one hand, I’d like to talk to him, but I think it will go about as well as the first conversation. I couldn’t figure out a tactfull way of saying the the errors were so grossly blatant that they had to be caused by extreme idiocy or exreme carelessness. This is not something I can really provide feedback about.