Because management is busy with important stuff, like meetings and Powerpoint presentations and discussing goals and directions.

The mundane, boring things like actual work are not their area of expertise.

I was working in Asia, and helping a customer team with one product. I did a couple of presentation on the platform, and some on life skills, such as "if you do not like your job - it's your fault - you should change jobs".

I had several people come and see me "for a career chat", and also to ask me basic questions about DB/2. The senior person in charge of the DB/2 team was never there, he was always out "with customers" and executives, so the more junior people had no one to go and ask technical questions. I knew a little about DB/2 so could answer some of their questions.

I mentioned the lack of visibility of the DB/2 team leader to some of the senior managers I was working with, but did not seem to get very far. The culture was not to criticise your elders or peers, so they were not used to the feedback I gave.

A month or so later the DB2 team leader got a job in Marketing, and was apparently very good at it.

I had some feedback from one of the senior managers saying "thank you for your feedback, but you did not handle the situation well". The fact I had raised the issue meant that the management team were not doing their job very well, and so caused "loss of face". I went back a few months later, and the DB/2 team were much happier. So overall a success.

One guy was moved between so many teams and eventually ended up with us as the "American" side of things

One weekend he managed to fuck up royally on something that not only cost him a lot of his work, but some external consultants we had, who then had to redo all their work (not easy in the tool).

Then found out at some stage he was involved with some backup/VM's and not quite sure of the ins and outs, but we know there were some problems on that side of the pond for a few weeks - because of him.

Why still there ? Seems there were family connections with the CTO, so just moved. Seems we were the last chance saloon.

Another, was so useless that most of us did that persons work, but was so chummy with management, they could do no wrong and always got good pay rises and bonus (we all didn't). Being TUPEd and a few mis mailings and we could see just how beneficial "chummy" could be

And at another company, one person who we all knew was shit, stayed on because of their KPI's - being the best in the teams. The reason was a really bad print server and their ability to grab all the tickets as quick as possible and reboot the server. Became clear once the print servers were consolidated and therefore much more reliable and no longer crashing

Not tested, but you get the idea

#!/bin/bash

#report file value by email every hour

while true

do

cat thefilewithavalue | mail -s "file value" who@wantstoknow.com

sleep 3600

done

The problem, as described, has several empty spaces. Where's the file, what format is the value, do we need validation, what protocol is used for reporting, what format does the reporting expect, how big is the value, how frequently must it be reported, should you report the value if unchanged, are there firewalls and are they configured correctly, what to do on error. A few more.

A significant chunk of the two hours would involve filling in those empty spaces. Depending on what they turn out to be, two hours could be plenty of time, or nowhere near enough.

Your solution is assuming the easiest possible answers for all of those questions. Local file, string, assume valid, email, no format changes, sufficiently short that performance is not an issue, very low reporting frequency, don't care about repetition, all other systems already correctly configured, ignore errors... In reality, we are lucky if we get the easiest answer on a few of those.

our management wanted to know what skills people had and so commissioned an expensive survey of people's skills. There was a question like "rate your TCP/IP skills from 0 to 10 - where 0 is no skill and 10 is an expert" one of my junior colleagues put himself down as an 8 (he knew all he needed to know to do his job ). I put myself down as a 3 because there was so much I didn't know.

When the results were analysed the results were upside down. The manager responsible called some of the senior people in to discuss the results, and we decided the results were meaningless.

We quickly wrote a new one page survey. "Who would you go and see about a TCP/IP performance problem" ... or TCP/IP coding problem... or debugging TCP/IP problems".

This showed the real experts in the area. Some quiet people where flagged as "experts" and so got management recognition for this.

The Dunning-Kruger effect in action (and reverse effect).

What amazes most is that something was done about it. Normally, the Dunning-Kruger effect is most pronounced in management circles.

Until recently, I was in a flat-share with someone who works in sales support for a fairly large IT services house. For a year - all the time I knew them - they worked from home three days a week. On most of these days someone from the office called them shortly after 9am to make sure they were awake and ready for work. On several occasions I heard their phone ring and ring because they obviously slept through this 'alarm call'.

I suspect they were some kind of product or client specialist and this skill obviously made them so very useful to the business that their work ethic was accepted but it must have been thoroughly demoralising for the rest of their team.

Anonymous for an obvious reason

Used to be a worker drone on a contracted production line. Kinda specialist work but hated every minute of it (medical device cleanroom manufacture for a separate client).

Generally the team of 20 I was in tended to cover for each other as our line mangler - let's call him Mike - was useless to the levels of not knowing production quantities.

Mike "What are those others doing setting up a batch too?"

Worker Drone #7 "Mike, we do three batches a week."

Mike "Since when?"

Worker Drone #7 "Oh for about six months now"

The majority of the guys and girls I worked with were fine, but one guy - same age as me so definitely old enough to know better - used to spend his work day trying to get in the pants of the three women we had working there, and expected everyone else to cover for his work. This started within his first week...It turned out that the boss had recruited him, and was clearly ignoring all these issues as we had a £1,000 bounty if someone stayed for six months!

Evidently said mangler was happy to piss everyone else off just for personal gain of a grand. Saving grace was that our director hated his guts, and he got made redundant along with the rest of us when the client ran out of money.

There's the opposite of this. We had some young lady briefly attached to our team. She was some sort of high-flier being rotated from team to team. Pleasant enough person for a high flier but with no skills relevant to us. I had to invent some sort of task for her. Fortunately she moved on after a few weeks to fly higher elsewhere - I think possibly because her husband relocated elsewhere but frankly I never found out why she was even employed in the business for the few months she was there.

Did he have dementia? Did he have cancer? Some sort of family tragedy?

That's not lazy or slack, and definitely not normal-bloke behaviour. Shouty shouty boss might have asked if everything was alright first

My previous line manager was an idle sod who made massive mistakes not because he wasn't competent but because he was too lazy to do the job properly. I was given a poison chalice project (think has to be done within a set timeframe and is production critical) where - let's call him "M" handed me details of the project plus a cost spreadsheet. (as you might guess from my name I'm a chemical engineer by training) with the words "I've done all the work for you, all you have to do is get it built".

Sitting down with my oppo mechanical and electrical engineers we went through the design and it became obvious that it wasn't going to work. Not only was it not going to work but the cost spreadsheet was out by 20% of the total project cost just for electrical and instruments (missed out the requirements for additional PLC I/O cards, new rack, new electrical panels etc.)

I was called in by the Works Director to explain what had gone wrong and was greeted by "don't worry, I know whose fault this is, just tell me how M cocked it up this badly".

M was later caught asleep at his desk by the same Works Director and ended up as the only manager reporting to another manager (an effective demotion).

I later came across him working as a contract engineer at another company.