How do you guys handle mediocre average IT workers?

kohr-ah

bpenn wrote: »

Sometimes I wonder how people get these good jobs when they don't know **** about them. I seriously cringed.

Many times it is all about who you know.

datacomboss

I think many who are perceived as lazy and in fact just dumb and/or uneducated.

I incorporate Wonderlic scores into my overall eval of perspective employees, shying away from applicants with scores less than 22.

Mooseboost

kohr-ah wrote: »

Many times it is all about who you know.

I think this pretty much nails it.

UnixGuy

bpenn wrote: »

Sometimes I wonder how people get these good jobs when they don't know **** about them. I seriously cringed.

I'll tell you how....

The reality is, those people are needed in every organisation and she might not be as bad as we think she is. Let me explain...

What if there was no budget in her department, and the manager had to hire someone who is a sysadmin with *little* networking experience? Maybe she is excellent with VMWare and SAN storage, but she never touched routers before and suddenly her manager asked her to configure things and she had to ask for help?

I'm not trying to find excuses, I'm just saying how people get hired. She might be hired for other skills like systems or storage or even programing and has little to no networking experience/knowledge.

Also, what if her job duties are really entry level and boring? Do you think an experienced professional would accept that job? No, so they have to hire the best they can at the time (when budget was/is available). That job might not be as good as we think it is...in fact most jobs aren't good jobs, they're mostly boring, repetitive, and require little to no brains efforts (yes configuring stuff isn't as mentally demanding as we'd like to think sometimes...at least not when we have experience..). A good manager/leader should look to improve the skills of average employees and make them stars.

Point is, not everyone is a super star, and not everyone need to be. You absolutely need 'mediocre'(I don't like this word, it's relative...sometimes we're not as good as we think we are, we might be mediocre ourselves, ask Steve Jobs..) people to do average tasks, and MOST(if not all) IT tasks are average and repetitive by nature.

IT super stars should start their own business and make a killing in a startup, make a new app, invent, change the world...or just keep doing a repetitive job. I understand this is a tough pill to swallow, but this is reality.

F8uad

linuxabuser wrote: »

This is 80% of all IT workers I've encountered. I uh, I guess I get frustrated with them and move on in two years or so.

According to according to Deloitte's Shift Index survey , 80% are dissatisfied with their jobs

Maybe its the reason why they don't want to Improve