Beyond Brillant
We've all had cow-orker'swhocouldn'tdotheirjobs. Some people have even had the privilege of working with Paula.
Jarad should be so lucky.
He worked at Initech in a small development group, building a Windows client tool that customers used to interface with their server. One day, they decided to port the app from .NET to Java. The powers-that-be recommended a highly regarded Lead Java Developer, Kiesha, from Intelligenuity, to lead the project. "Don't worry," they said, "Intelligenuity only employs the most brillant programmers."
At the first group stand up meeting of the project, their manager announced that they would use Eclipse for the Java project. Kiesha posited "I don't have Eclipse. Could someone please send it to me?" So Jarad sent her the link. At the next stand up, he followed up to ask if she had gotten Eclipse installed. She said "I was blocked because she had been unable to download it, so I waited for the next meeting to ask for help." Their manager jumped on her machine and solved her problem by clicking on the download link for her.
Fast forward to the next meeting and she said that she was still unable to proceed because "Eclipse was having some problem with 'JDK' and could someone please send me that?" Jarad sent her that link too. Several days later at the next meeting, she said "Eclipse isn't working because it needs a 'jar' file, so could someone please send one to me?" And after that, "Could someone please send me sample code for doing classes because Eclipse kept saying NullPointerException".
Finally the manager changed the meeting structure. They would continue their usual standups for the Windows client, but they would add a separate dedicated meeting with just Kiesha. Eventually, they found out that she and her husband were buddies with a highly placed C** executive and his wife. The separate meeting was to "guarantee that she's successful," which meant their manager was writing the code for her.
One day, Kiesha told the manager that a customer was having a critical problem with the web portal, and that it was of the utmost importance that they have a meeting with the customer as soon as possible to help resolve the issue.
Their manager set up a meeting with the customer, himself, Kiesha, Jarad, and the project manager to solve it once and for all. The day of the meeting, the customer was surprised at how many support people and managers showed up. The customer explained. "The, um" 'portal problem' is that we asked Kiesha for the URL of the web portal? This could have been an email."
Sometimes, there is justice in this world, as Kiesha finally lost her job.
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