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People Are Sharing 30 Red Flags That Show That A Coworker Is Useless Or Out Of Their Depth
When you work closely with other people, aka your colleagues, you inevitably see what they’re up to on a daily basis. You develop this procrastination radar, which basically combines the experiences from your own moments of slacking to that of your coworkers. With a single glimpse or an eavesdrop, you can determine whether the day for your teammate is a productive one or not.
So when someone asked on Reddit “In your line of work, what red flags identify a colleague as being useless/out of their depth?” people had a bunch of stories to share. Sometimes it’s the new coworker lacking skill so badly you wonder how the hell they made it here, other times it’s a person who can’t take criticism or no for an answer. Sometimes it’s a colleague that’s always so silent that you wonder if they’re secretly binge watching The Office at their desk instead of doing their assignments.
Oh boy, the stories are endless. Below we collected some of the most interesting ones!
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Worked in a psych hospital. People who think that it is hierarchy, with patients being the lowest, are the biggest red flag. It is a collective effort to help people who are experiencing the worst time in their life.
You don’t get to taunt and bully patients by threatening to take away the few privileges they are allowed, just because it makes you feel powerful. There is nearly always a conflict free way to handle a situation.
In 7 years, I never had to restrain a patient. And many other coworkers didn’t either, because we respected and worked with the patients and their disorders. Those coworkers who didn’t and “had” to restrain all the time, did so because they had an us vs. them mentality, and felt the patients were less than them. And the patients knew it, and acted out accordingly to the hostility they perceived.
I agree with this. One of the most important parts of working in mental health is making sure the patient feels heard, even if they are in the middle of a psychotic episode and are having delusions and or hallucinations, to them their experience is very real. The number of times I saw patients kick off when all the staff had to do was acknowledge their reality.
In order to find out how we could best deal with a colleague who procrastinates at work, and how they can affect the overall productivity in the workplace, we spoke with Christine Mitterbauer, a licensed and ICF-approved career coach and serial entrepreneur. “This can be very frustrating, especially if it affects your own work. Confronting your coworker up front can backfire, though, so you need to go about this more subtly,” she said.
People that brag about how long they work and/or stay in the office.
That's cool buddy. You worked 12 hours and were about as productive as me and I worked my usual 7.
I am a lab tech. When I get someone fresh out of school to train, their intelligence isn't a factor in my overall judgement. It's their work ethic. Are they willing to work past the frustration and tedium of a complicated situation? I'll take persistence over genius any day of the week.
At one company, we had a guy who, when stuck, sat on it quietly, didn't ask for help, didn't make it known he was stuck, just waited until someone came along {some time later} to ask how it was going.
This. Don't ever do this.
“One of the first things to try is to ask your coworker if you can help them with something. If they say no, tell them if they ever have any questions or feel stuck, you’d be happy to help them along,” Christine explained and added that “Procrastination is often caused by overwhelm and because the person doesn’t know where to start.” That’s why, she argues, telling them they can always come to you for support can be helpful and solve some of the procrastination.
I’m a retired Immigration Services Officer. My job was to adjudicate visa petitions, and I also did fraud work. My job was similar to that of a judge. I needed to be impartial, look at evidence, request more evidence if needed, and approve or deny a visa (the fraud stuff was a bit more complex). If an officer has an obvious bias, they are worthless. Sure, we’re all human and have our own personal views, but those need to be dropped at the door. It doesn’t matter what our politics are, where our family is from, what our personal experiences might be, if we have an agenda, we can’t do our jobs effectively.
RN here. I know I might offend some other nurses on here, but if you come into work and your hair is not put up, that's just telling me that you don't intend on doing any dirty work. I have pretty, long black hair and I pull it all the way up so it won't fall on my patient when I'm dressing their wound or get in my face when I'm doing chest compressions. You float on my unit with your hair down, I'm already judging you
When you're training somebody and come across something new to them. If you explain the law/procedure and they say, "yeah I know that". Then why the hell did you do it that way if you knew? It's ok if you didn't know because I hadn't taught you that yet. Because now I can't trust them to be honest about their capabilities. So I have to check everything that person does because I can't be sure if they actually understand it.
This is a big one for me....my team trains people in very specialised manufacturing operations. There is no other place like ours in the country, and when we get an external hire come in and says "yeah..I know that" to one of my trainers...I see HUGE red flags. Especially as I interview a massive percentage of external trainees and know exactly what their work history is ....they can't possibly know what my guys are teaching them on some very particular equipment...the age on some items is over 60yrs old and no manuals or internet knowledge exists...only inside tacit knowledge
For those who’re wondering if it is often a good idea to complain about your colleague to management, Christine said that “sometimes we might have no other choice, but it’s not the first thing to do.”
She explained: “Before you complain to a manager, you should be able to demonstrate what you have done yourself to solve the problem. Did you offer help and support to your colleague, and have you recorded down several incidents in detail so you can back up your complaint to your manager? Always put yourself in other people’s shoes and try and see things from their perspective: What could be the reason that your colleague is procrastinating? If you think really hard, how can you help solve this before turning to your manager?”
Moreover, in terms of taking on the manager’s perspective, they’re probably very busy and have lots of other challenges to solve already. “What will they think about you for coming to them with a problem you might have been able to solve, or at least initiated to solve, yourself?”
I once watched a graphic designer measuring her screen with a ruler.
She did not even have the zoom set to 100%.
Edit: she was not using Photoshop, it was Illustrator. She just did not know that there is a window that tells an object's size when selected, and she was measuring a single object.
She yelled at me when I showed her.
Social worker - I can tell who's going to burn out within weeks of their starting at the agency. Huge red flag if they start taking paperwork home on the weekends to "catch up". You never catch up. If I gave you a week full of 50 hour days you wouldn't catch up. You do the best you can, prioritize correctly and leave work at work when the week is done. The second you start taking work home for the weekend you're going to burn out, and it happens quickly.
Not coming out from behind the nurses station to help staff answer call lights. If I see a fellow nurse spend more time in the nurses station than on the hall, I know 1) you’re lazy, 2) you don’t care about the patients, and 3) you have sloppy nursing technique.
Nursing is a team sport. If you’re not actively busy delivering nurse only patient care, roll up your sleeves and help out your fellow staff or go home and be lazy there.
Omg this should be up higher. I got fired at 19 from a cna job cause this lpn told me she couldn't bother to stop her med pass to help me pick a gd patient off the floor (she had pads all around her low rise bed cause she had vertigo) and then screamed at me cause i went to the extra help ward and got the RN supervisor to help me then help me write up a report. Let me say this loud for you too proud of nurses in the back now that I'm a RN supervisor DO NOT EVER THINK YOUR BETTER THAN THE STAFF BELOW YOUR LEVEL OF PAY. THATS FOR YOU DOCTORS TOO. Those CNAs med techs patient techs are your back bone, eyes ears and personal assistant to those patients. Jump in and help out or get out of the field! I love helping CNAs. You guys rock.
Having said that, Christine confirmed that unproductive colleagues may damage the productivity of the whole team or department. However, she stayed positive and assured us that there are a lot of things you can try to help, before it even comes to this.
“Once you have exhausted offering your own support, been patient and slept on the challenge, it might be time to tell your manager about it. But prepare well for this meeting—make sure you can explain what all you have done to solve the problem yourself, how exactly the problem has affected the team and/or the company’s performance, include time and dates when this happened.”
Christine’s advice is also to make sure you comment on the behavior of the incompetent colleague, not their personality traits or anything else that might make you be seen as unprofessional.
Security: people who brag about how they're all tough, best at [insert martial art here], will tackle the first person who looks at them the wrong way, and generally put out an air of aggressiveness. Nobody wants that. In security, you want level-headed people who don't go off like a rocket at the drop of a pin. Worst of all, in my experience, the rawr-I'm-so-tough-people are usually the ones who cause the most problems and/or the first to be absolutely useless when an emergency happens.
Security should really be about de-escalation and problem solving. Ditto policing.
Talking down to the techs.
Don't do this if you are an engineer. Please don't.
I'm on the Engineer side and trust me, talking down to tech would be idiotic as hell! Those guys usually have so much more practial experience! And it is worth way more than theory ;)
can't bring themselves to shower/change a grown woman
can't clean up s**t
I'm a health care aide at a group home for disabled women. If someone can't deal with a woman's tantrums, or has trouble using the hoyer, that's something that can take time, patience and practice. But if you can't get past those two things above, you're just not going to be able to do it. Really, it's mostly a matter of being able to do things out of your initial comfort zone. Too many people get grossed out by the disabled and all the different ways that sometimes they need to be assisted, and if you can't get past that then you're just going to be bad at the job and bad for the resident. They deserve better.
Someday, these people will need that help, and be hurt and embarrassed when nobody wants to deal with their malfunctioning bodies.... So be kind. You never know when it's your turn to be the one who can't wipe their own backside. It can happen like a flash.
Unwillingness to be wrong. If you get called out for being wrong and don’t agree, have the civil discussion and defend your position, if you can’t defend it without getting upset, you, in fact, are wrong. You just learned something new - be grateful.
I HATE being wrong. As much as I can accept it and learn from it, I just hate it. I prefer learning from being right at new things. :)
Line cook here. Its pretty obvious the second someone picks up a knife. Or anyone who brags about going to culinary school alot is generally a bad cook.
:edit if you cut yourself just bandage it up and put a glove on and get to it. Unless you're missing a finger, that's different, lol.
Someone who does math on a calculator and keys the answer into an Excel spreadsheet!
therapists claiming they’ve “never needed therapy” almost always need it, really badly
I barista at a cafe that serves food. We recently had a new hire and I knew she wasn't going to last long when she struck up a conversation with one of the customers at the counter with a line of about 5 people behind them. You can definitely be friendly, but there is too much stuff to do to make time for a full on chat about life and stuff. She ended up being fired the following week.
As an introvert, my favorite part of working customer service is that I could have the same conversation with people 300 times in a day. It's easier on my brain. It's friendly and quick, but people are more predictable than they think. Interact with enough people doing the same thing, it's easy to develop an internal script that keeps the line moving.
Illustrator here. People who get offended at specific technical criticism (wrong perspective, bad anatomy, etc) and/or justify it with "That's my style".
You see similar behaviour in creative writing. I was reading this guy's work once and he had used "specie" instead of "species". When I pointed out he'd used the wrong word, he airily told me he knew that but didn't care because "it sounds better!". I pointed out that readers would only respond by thinking "this moron doesn't know the difference between specie/species", he just laughed it off. Unsurprisingly, his writing career didn't go anywhere.
Former Field technician here.
In college we had a Halloween themed labs where we went out and measured the distance from our transact (The line we walk) and any zombie poster we can see from that transect. One of my classmates was hugely biased, saying things like "I can't really see that poster" or "That's really far away, let's skip it"
In a real job when you are collecting data, being lazy is the worst thing you can be. It creates biased data and can noticeably skew your results.
Damn! If that guy missing out on seeing stuff he gonna leave damn viruses in the test samples... RIP the poor peeps coming for path-lab tests.... Eeeeeek!!!
Not acknowledging incidents/mistakes. If we find out about it in any way other than by your mouth and your incident report, it's grounds for firing. Bonus points if we find out you damaged a client or our property and didn't report it.
I really hope they meant damaged "a client's property" not "a client"
if they suck up excessively to people, it means they are bad but are trying to use their social skills to keep their job
Unfortunately this still works because of the "human" factor. If you try to cut dead weight, suddenly you're seen as a monster. But what people don't realize is having one person not pulling their weight means everyone has to do more and paid the same.
I’m always suspicious of other filmmakers who don’t watch movies. Hope that doesn’t sound pretentious, I understand people are busy and don’t always have free time to go to the movie theater for 2 hours and pay 10.99 for a ticket, but being educated about current trends in the industry seems like an obvious part of the job.
As a developer, an entry level person started working for the company. I'm a mid dev, but sit near her so I was helping her get going. First job outside school, I understand that a large codebase is overwhelming.
I place her in the file and even method and we step through the front end to back end code. I give her an idea of where I see the issue is. I ask if she has any questions. Of course no was the answer. A day goes by, and she is still in the same exact function with the same look on her face. Do you have any questions? No.
TL DR: If you're lost, please ask questions. People can't guess what doesn't make sense to you.
As an explanation: in some job and career advice centres, people are taught to not ask questions or not to say that they don't know or don't understand. It's considered a bad look, a letdown, a personal failure. Was told the same thing in my school, college, and university career guidance, along with the job centre backing this idea. Best thing to do here is talk and reassure, they are going to be nervous and scared.
The receptionist/mailroom woman NEVER fails to let every last person in the office know how busy she is, claims to have a list of 25+ duties she has on a daily basis, and has the uncanny and enviable ability to turn down any and every new responsibility that comes her way. She's got her supervisor snowed completely. She's such a pain in the ass that no one asks her to do ANYTHING, even her job (MAIL. ANSWERING PHONES).
HOWEVER, at any given time she's actually at her desk and not on a smoke break, she's got solitaire maximized on her giant monitor, or she's asking your opinion on whether or not she should buy the latest funny t-shirt she found online.
In any line of work, I feel like any individual who isn't willing to cooperate with others is a huge red flag to any goal orientated job or company.
We get a lot of updates that affect how we perform our jobs. We can get a new update each week. I can't stand it when as soon as the email hits the inbox, a lazy coworker asks what the email is about--asking for details on the new policy instead of just reading it! I honestly thought that one of my coworkers had reading issues bc this happened a lot. Then, there are a few other coworkers who will ask you questions about a policy and admit that they didn't read the update. Pisses me off.
I'm a massage therapist.
Whenever I meet a loud or pushy therapist I always wonder. I've done couples massages with therapists like this and 9/10 times they talk to their client through the whole massage, which is a big no no.
Usually people want to relax during a massage.
'Usually but not always. Good massage therapists should let their clients dictate how much conversation happens.
When other teachers only scream at their classes while only giving their students worksheets.
Constantly calling out and never picking up extra jobs, half assing their job, refusing to communicate properly to avoid fault (it doesn't work that way), complaining about clients as soon as they leave or while they're STILL RIGHT THERE.
Note: this post originally had 86 images. It’s been shortened to the top 30 images based on user votes.
I've done editing work for a couple of different publishing companies, and when you encounter a newbie author who responds to editorial feedback by arguing and trying to explain away their mistakes instead of fixing them, that's when you know you've come across someone who's going places. Places such as the nearest remainders bin.
100. Pro writers understand the value of editing
Load More Replies... Medicine. Don't go into it for the money. You will kill people that way. Whether immediately or by cumulative effect, doesn't matter. No place for ego or greed. IMO. Big red flag for me: "I can't believe I'm only getting (thrice the national average salary) for this job!" OK, get away from the patients *now*. If someone's whinging about their pay, when it's very good compared to most others, it *will* affect their treatment of patients. And I'm not okay with that.
I once had a hospital stay for sepsis. Was outside taking in some fresh air near the ED and a Porsche went by being driven by a very young looking male with the personalised plate surgeon. I prayed he would never operate on me or anyone I knew. Just an ego parading around in public clearly fresh out of med school. He creeped me out big time.
Load More Replies...
I've got one -journalists. If a new one says they don't want to do a 'boring' story about local politics or doesn't 'want' too call the family of the guy who just died in a tragic accident, then you'll be gone in less than 14 days. If you aren't fascinated by the every day workings of the world or don't get why you have to call the family (imagine seeing a story about your tragedy and NOT being asked about it first) this isn't for you
I've done editing work for a couple of different publishing companies, and when you encounter a newbie author who responds to editorial feedback by arguing and trying to explain away their mistakes instead of fixing them, that's when you know you've come across someone who's going places. Places such as the nearest remainders bin.
100. Pro writers understand the value of editing
Load More Replies... Medicine. Don't go into it for the money. You will kill people that way. Whether immediately or by cumulative effect, doesn't matter. No place for ego or greed. IMO. Big red flag for me: "I can't believe I'm only getting (thrice the national average salary) for this job!" OK, get away from the patients *now*. If someone's whinging about their pay, when it's very good compared to most others, it *will* affect their treatment of patients. And I'm not okay with that.
I once had a hospital stay for sepsis. Was outside taking in some fresh air near the ED and a Porsche went by being driven by a very young looking male with the personalised plate surgeon. I prayed he would never operate on me or anyone I knew. Just an ego parading around in public clearly fresh out of med school. He creeped me out big time.
Load More Replies... I've got one -journalists. If a new one says they don't want to do a 'boring' story about local politics or doesn't 'want' too call the family of the guy who just died in a tragic accident, then you'll be gone in less than 14 days. If you aren't fascinated by the every day workings of the world or don't get why you have to call the family (imagine seeing a story about your tragedy and NOT being asked about it first) this isn't for you
