I work for a corporation in IT. We had a guy we'll call Milo working for about 5 years as a Linux Engineer. He had a certification from a few years ago that was three Linux versions behind what we are using. At this company, an engineer title makes significantly more money than the rest of us “advisors” or “seniors”. Anyway, I've worked here almost two years on the Linux team. Interacting with this guy about work was difficult. He couldn't stay on work-related subjects. Most answers were how he doesn't know something, then has a story that goes with why or how he doesn't know. Or it was stories about the good old days of floppy drives and DOS, then he would talk about going to Jamaica a few times a year for vacation.
Here are some examples of incidents over the last year or so:
* He made a scheduled task on a server using the wrong password for a service account, then he was tasked to figure out what keeps locking the service account, and he said he has no idea but is able to spend 2 months on the project.
* He was tasked to do some code modernization on a list of scripts that do certain functions. He said he wanted to re-write them in the Ruby language. After 3 months the scripts were useless – he copy/pasted some of the content in each script so the files were bigger, and the date was updated but could not be used.
* He “worked from home” and was assigned documentation for our systems. He had old documents and was told what to update and was sent diagrams to insert into the documents – the docs were saved to make the date change, and no other modifications were done.
* Destroyed a server with a “find” command – easy to do, it was a rookie mistake, but this guy is holding the position of Linux engineer. He either didn't own up to it, or he sincerely didn't understand what he did.
* Tasked to create role-based access control for identity manager for our network. Not simple, but he is an engineer so this should be the level of his day-to-day job. After 8 months, zero progress was made on this. We had our network inspected by a vulnerability team. It was discovered that an unauthorized person could make accounts for people. The team said role-based access control should be set up to prevent this.
* When patching was done, he never did follow-ups to ensure everything restarted if needed or if services were intact after a restart.
We have a requirement to have the latest Linux certification. Milo said he was really concerned about this because he passed version 5 a few years ago after taking it 4 times, and he didn't know how he passed.
Management knew about his activities or lack of, and they shuffled him from manager to manager with low ratings every review he got. No one had done the paperwork to fire him until our manager did. It turned out that he had three years of things like this happening, so I only saw a small slice.
When his name is brought up to other people on our team and other departments, there are similar stories of his destruction. I've asked around, and he didn't talk to anyone else about Jamaica, that was just me. I'm wondering if it was just to keep me off task or distracted for some reason.
My big question is just why? Was he actually incompetent and we were getting 100% of him always, or was he just doing things to waste time at work to go home?