Credit where credit is due . . .
When I was in my 20’s I worked at a large telecom on backend systems. Most of the work involved generating reports about various systems with scripts or C++ on a repeating basis. I often worked by myself but from time to time I got teamed up to work with some folks on my team. There had been a recent reorg and I had both a new manager and a few new coworkers that came along with the new manager. One of the new coworkers, a man a few years older than me, had the reputation of being — how shall we put it — lazy.
My new manager comes up to me and asks that I work with the other employee. I believe he had hopes of me helping the lazy employee be more productive, I was well known for being easy to work with. This project was dead simple. Go through and document the various reporting programs we currently had, their inputs and outputs and produce a report for everyone on the team to look at and know what was already out there. The idea was to let the new and old teammates alike be able to produce new reports without reimplementing the wheel too much by reusing what we already had available if possible. I was pretty knowledgeable about what was available so I was an obvious choice.
The work was easy: track down all the programs, document where their source was, what their inputs were, and what their outputs were — including short examples of both. These were not complex programs and just required a bit of reading code and writing down what we saw.
I spent a few hours writing down a list of what needed to be done and worked with the other coworker to show him what he needed to do. The work was such that we could each just grab an item to work on, spend a few hours writing it down in a document and move on to the next.
Daily I tried to check in with him and see where we both were on our work. I never could find him. He would be on a smoke break. Running an errand. The few times I did find him, something had come up and he was just about to start on the task. By the end of a couple of days I gave up trying to check in with him. He hadn’t done any work. I realized it would be easier on me if I just did the work and let him do whatever it was he was going to do. I could easily finish it all within the week alotted. I did all the tasks, wrote the report, got all the documentation together. I shared via email with him the final results, I figure he should at least be familiar with it as we had to present it to our manager on Monday.
Monday comes around and first thing I head in to see the manager and show him our work. The other employee is already there, glibly chatting with the manager. I see he has a HUGE stack of papers with him, inches thick. Before I say anything he hands the stack to the manager. I just stay quiet, technically he’s the senior engineer so I let him roll with it. I’m curious where this is going. Since I had done all the work I wondered what all this was. He tells the manager that WE worked hard on the project and here was the result of OUR work.
The manager looks at it and goes ballistic. I decided I really didn’t like how the manager handled it in front of me. He dressed the other employee down. He should have asked me to step out.
You see, Friday, when I showed him the final report I also sent a copy to our manager. I explained to the manager that while I tried to work with the other employee he seemed to be really busy with other tasks so I made sure the work got done as instructed. The report went to my manager with only my name on the report. I didn’t throw the other employee under the bus, I just told it like it was. I really had no clue if the other employee had other important work or not, I just knew he didn’t work with me.
The manager was livid. Not only did the other employee claimed to have worked on the report. He stole credit in the most dumb way possible. I emailed him the Word doc. EMAILED the original! He printed it out. Whited out my name. WROTE his name and mine. Then photocopied it! Then to make it all look like even more work he proceeded to print out all the the source code referenced in the document. This was pointless except to make it look like a lot. Sure this was a long time ago, but we didn’t print out things like this and hand it to folks, you sent an email and IF they wanted a hard copy they made it themselves. He was both lazy and horrible at being lazy at the same time, making so much extra work for himself. I find good programmers are lazy in ways that reduces their work load. He was not a good programmer.
Sadly, it was really hard to fire someone at this company during this period. This guy finally moved on to another job. My favorite quote from him was, “Hey boss, I thought about work all weekend, can I have the rest of the day off?” — Note, he did not actually do work. He did not think or plan work he might do. He meant he literally thought about thinking about work and was exhausted from the ordeal.
Needless to say, we were all glad when he finally decided to move on!