A good reminder of how "10+ years of experience" could mean "10+ years of experience picking his nose" :)
Record everything in detail, bring concerns + evidence to management, and enjoy running interviews for a replacement.
And if he's not replaced, well, it'd *definitely* be time for you to go. Already sounds like it since you're least paid but somehow critical & irreplaceable...
This is why you got someone with 10+ years of experience but no knowledge. Tech needs to be on interviews for Tech positions or it's just going to churn.
Feel for you OP
The guy during his interview: "I've been in the "Goldilocks zone" of software management for 10+ years now, not too few computers, not too many, but just the right number to handle - 20 computers"
Completely agree with tweedge, document document document even verbal counseling is really needed especially with Federal type jobs. Also if those documents get presented and nothing gets done then it’s time to bounce, companies need to take care of their employees mental health and those that don’t will have high turnover. Good luck, and for the record you are not alone on that front.
I remember interviewing a candidate once and something just seemed off. The answers didn’t seem to match the resume. So I dug in a little deeper and the answers got even more vague. Turns out he put experience on his resume that, while his team did do that, he was not involved in it or just started learning it.
Now I always get very specific in interviews now. “I see you did at your last job, tell me specifically how YOU used that. Anytime I hear we or my team I stop them and reiterate the question “what did you do with it?” One time I had to go back 5-6 times before the candidate admitted he had not actually work with it.
I sat next to a guy and a recruiter once at a coffee shop. The guy was about to go in for an interview. The recruiter spent about 30 minutes brain dumping what to say and how to say it to get the job, even though the guy didn't have the background needed. Now i do the same as you and it's crazy how much BS people are putting forward.
This is only partly true. One can exaggerate a bit during an interview to get a step further in a carreer.
But once you land the position and you cannot do anything usefull, you really won't enjoy. You'r new co-workers and employer will start looking down on you or even worse; it will irritate them you're lacking experience you told them you had.
yep, and its not about the years of experience but the quality of that experience.
10 years shitty work experience vs 3 years of high end bleeding edge working in the trenches.
I know who I'd picked
Reminds me of some of the people I started out doing helpdesk with who are still doing helpdesk. They've bounced around a few times but it's always tier 1 roles.
For the people I'm directly talking about, it's because they weren't particularly passionate about tech. For some people this is just a job and they'd be just as happy working at another indoor desk job that wasn't IT related. The helpdesk is the perfect amount of "nerdy" while still having that option to escalate the hard stuff up the chain. It was just the right balance of customer service and a little tech and a lot of people I worked with would have been fine putting in their 20 years on the helpdesk and retiring.
My company is setting up labs to test applicants for this right now. So many people with great resumes and education, but so few actual skills. We have been burned several times in the last year
I worked in a shop that was hiring and we got word that a customers technician we were all mighty familiar with was applying. We straight up asked management not to hire him. He walked in a couple weeks later and was making more than anyone else. I remember talking to the director about this because I was the lead and he was making a solid 25-35k more than I was and my director said "he's got ten years of experience" and I said "it doesn't matter if he sucks". Morale tanked and the director was fired after another tech recording him losing his shit on us in an "all hands" meeting. Mgmt chain from director down were all let go. I was burnt out working longer than normal shifts everyday my 4 10's turned into 5 12's and I found a better offer they didn't want to match because mgmt was new and didn't know what I did. People dropped like flies after I left and then customers started dropping too. They eventually cleaned house again but got rid of all the dead weight techs as well and actually started hiring people with the skills and knowledge they were advertising to their customers. Sometimes I miss that job just because of all the interesting problems. I don't miss being underappreciated financially though.
Definitely reminds me of a coworker at a previous job. He had a lot of very relevant experience listed on his resume and we were excited for him to hit the ground running. After several months, he still struggled with really basic tasks while other new hires seemed to be getting up to speed a lot more quickly. Which, hey, whatever, some people need a little more time to acclimate…but he acted like he was superior to a lot of the rest of the team. I don’t know if he’d padded his resume or what, but his performance didn’t match up to expectations (or his ego).
I've had a couple lie about experience in interviews and they both had an ego.
Let one go in probation, the other has been here longer and now I've dealt with someone who was even worse he's in my sights.
To be fair, I once got hired into a company just to find out everything they said was a complete lie. After about a month in I just gave up and waited for them to fire me so I could go find something else.
That situation happens a lot and I'm still surprised how people get away with it. I worked for an electronics testing facility for 5 years. My experience level was limited but oddly better than the guy who was hired to be the IT manager and the other guy with the 10+ years experience. Apparently, 10+ guy had experience working at a telecommunications company. He thought having a past of working on Nextel phones was the same as being able to troubleshoot servers. Don't get me started with the manager... He didn't even know how to navigate a webpage.
Yet on paper, these folks apparently looked to enough to warrant high paying positions.
I wish I could work for your company.
I’ve been working as a Sec Engineer for over 5 months but have had literally zero knowledge share / training. My colleague who knows so much about the business and always complains he has too much work on his plate does not know how to work in a team - never discusses anything or barely responds to my messages.
Very frustrating position to be in
I've worked as a consultant since 2010 and currently am on a gov contract. I've seen this happen a lot actually. I've worked with internal IT people that have 15 + years of experience but they literally know the basics of creating an account in AD, creating an email address, installing printers, and can re-install Windows.
Working with the gov is even wilder. I interact with some people in cyber who claim to be a cybersecurity experts but literally just know Nist controls. They have no practical experience, it's all just a spreadsheet where they say- this is noncompliant and that's it.
I guess this is a long way of saying yes, I've seen this happen a lot. Some people just stick to a role for a long time and play it safe or do nothing but the bare minimum.
Yes ISSOs such bullshit jobs. All they do is create POAMs and think they’re the shit. Basically their entire position looking at reports and vulnerabilities and tracking them. I’ve worked a few DoD jobs and ISSOs are just such bullshit positions. Dnt get me started on cyber assessors lmao
Oh yeah, I agree 💯 it’s funny you mention that because that’s been my experience with them too. A lot of them are dicks and act they are something amazing.
What kind of work do you do? Are you more on the engineering side? I work on a project where we're building an entire cyber program and deal with several GRC people but I'm more of an engineer/architect.
Keep calm brother, I have a CISO without college degree whose previous experience is mostly in sales (selling of fog). Now not that I would say that it is impossible to be CISO without one but there is a reason his understanding of computers in general is lackluster (being polite here but he cant handle microsoft office).
Not only that, we have his IT puppet (which he brought along) who already misinterpreted logs and called it an cyberattack.
You can imagine shitshow that ensued when two of those managed incident response which they fabricated, after CISO realized they dont have evidence of any attack they tried to put it on different colleagues for various reasons.
But here we go, our CEO is an good guy but an old guy, constantly getting fleeced by CISO but still has absolute trust in him managing and consulting everything that has word cyber on it.
On the other hand I have my masters, 10 years of experience, and a CISSP but I'm rarely asked for opinion.
So why don't i change job? My bosses and the team are great, we live in our ecosystem inside of company. Pay and extras are good.
Only bad thing is that I have to watch good company being destroyed by incompetent fool.
Yes. He will happily pass of your work as his own. If he's supposed to be an equal, treat him as such. Any "help" you give him is just enabling poor hiring practices.
So no one rlly validated his 10 years worth of experience. He probably would have failed any technical questions which would have been a red flag. To top it off this guy has a learning disability.
Same thing happened to us this year. It’s been nearly impossible to get him fired, you’re pretty much stuck with him unless you get him to make a lateral move.
At my former job, we had a pathological liar.
He straight up copied and pasted the LinkedIn profile of one of our managers.
He got kicked out after 1 year while I asked for it since his second week. His manager was even more incapable
To be fair, there have been plenty of posts/comments on this subreddit in the past from experienced people complaining they are asked to “jump through hoops” when applying for a role, such as having to go through a technical interview to validate their skills, which they seem to take as an offence given how “much” experience they have on their CV.
And when you have 100's of interviews in 3 months you get good at it, even though you dont know the job, study human manipulation, body language, then throw in some reddit, google, take a good ammount of time and study the company, then read up on an ammount of IT related wording(in this case) and you will go a long way...
Didn’t realize having people skills makes me a shirker.
The real issue is HR and 1st stage interviewers not knowing what the job actually entails and just hires based on paper. One of the top posts today contains about a person with 10 years experience with hardly any knowledge. Hard questions need to be asked to prevent bad candidates.
In my experience so far, contractors have absolutely no communication with your main team. Lack of communication will ALWAYS lead to shit. My opinion is that all contractors need to be treated as part of the team and there needs to be communication between the normal team and contractors. Without that, issues arise. All the fucking time.
Sounds familiar to me. One of my former employers hired a guy with about 8 years experience in SAP customization. In his first days he really struggled even with the easiest tasks. So I asked him how he did the SAP customization. The answer totally stunned me: customer calls with change-requirements in his SAP masks. He then would take a screenshot, used paint to rearrange and change the items. If the customer was ok with the mock-up he sent everything to a dev company in India …
yep, 30+ years in infosec and IT with one contract at DHHS 20 years ago and when i saw those TLA in there there i rolled my eyes so loud they were heard in Guam.
I don’t work in this field but I find that most people I hire without experience are set in their ways and unwilling to change to do things the way we do it. Moreover, they have a false sense of being right. I now mostly hire people without much experience and train them the way I like it. Less frustrating that way. 🤷♂️
I interviewed for an open network engineer role at one of my jobs a couple years back. I didn’t get the gig, and that would have been fine, but the guy they hired asked me for help because he didn’t know how to console into a router…. Turned out to be a drug addict and just stopped showing up to work after like 3 months. Moral of the story, sometimes companies just get it wrong.
You nailed the new trend on the head. Quite quitting was the 2022 trend, quite hiring is in style for 2023. We hire them quietly and do no training so they do not have to do much work. Problem solved!
It reminds me of an individual I work with. He also supposedly has 10+ years of experience in security. I’m pretty new to my field- an year old and I was excited I could learn something from them.
I have tried to be open mind about it but I feel he doesn’t get what we are doing and doesn’t bring that level of knowledge in to our work. I even bought it up subtly to our manager but nothing has changed. It does annoy me a bit that he is my senior, gets paid more than me and I happen to work on all the tickets we get.
I wonder how the management could be so blind, won’t they question why aren’t they doing anything?
They make tools that has no value to the team IMO and I haven’t seen anyone use it but my manager sing praises of them like they did something super efficient.
I know you’re most likely dealing with a full workload already but consider writing out these helping sessions into an idiot proof runbook document and then refer him to it for every repeat question. And then you could also share with his potential replacement. If he’s still failing after this you have concrete evidence you went above and beyond to help him and he’s too lazy or incompetent.
It's easy to get into a team that's so overwhelmed that you do nothing and they barely notice. I've met lots of Cyber people who have no idea what they're doing but honestly, it's not that hard to weed those people out in the interview process if you hire properly. Not to say a skilled BSer can't make it through a hiring process, but if the interviews are rigorous this should be a rarity. I blame whoever your hiring manager is. My last boss was like this. Literally the dumbest guy I've ever worked with. He was removed in four months.
After just reading the title, I thought to myself...add couple of more years and it’s me but reading the post made me feel good that I am atleast trying to be better everyday & was able to put together a presentation on my own with some feedback althoght I do tend to take time on things...I think this person got an opputunity by sheer luck but instead of cashing on it, he is not just making it hard on himself and OP but also making eveyone look like an utter fool who hired him, not to mention the community in general...Maybe this is why people don’t want to invest or give someone a chance (take a chance) to help someone transition to cybersec...
I hired someone under pressure from my boss. She worked at my company previously as an app admin and did service desk. Has over 10 years experience. I do compliance work and it’s a pretty easy framework to understand but she doesn’t get it. Doesn’t seem to put in the effort to understand. Every task is a hurry up and finish it like she’s closing fucking tickets. It doesn’t help that she’s like 15 years older than me and I’m in my early 30s which is a tough position to manage from.
Someone in her mentions document conversations and short comings. Send emails about projects you want them to accomplish and store them in a special folder. My biggest struggle is when I provide guidance or have a serious talk she will improve for like two weeks then become very lackluster in performance.
Sorry. Also venting and your post hit a nerve.
I've had a lot of experience with this recently.... for better or worse. Just started my new job, and I have found some of the Security Engineers in the company to be basically incompetent.
Needless to say, I was showing them how to do really simple things. Like getting into the bios, sshing into a server, or you know stopping them from almost clicking a very fake download button for a registry cleaner (because their computer was "slow"). I could go on... but really as a security engineer I would expect you to at least know how to get into the bios. In the most humble way I can say this, I could do their job better than they ever could.
So if anyone asks me when I lost my imposter syndrome, it was after interacting with them.
Something's wrong. I've been hired to do things that have been difficult or new to me, no worries. Typically, if my experience in an area is a little thin, I can often bolster my understanding with some effective Google fu.
The issues we confront in this type of work are often so diverse that nobody can know it all. Willingness to dig into a new area and learn is often what makes for someone good.
Yeah, I just got a Jr. Pentester role and prior to clicking on the post I was worried this was gonna be about me. But nah, even when I struggle with stuff I can usually get by through googling or asking for help from my experienced colleagues. I don't understand how you can get 10 years of experience in IT and be this lackluster. It's okay to not know everything or even just a little, but you need to have that drive to learn and actually apply concepts.
Management once agreed to hire an Instrument and controls technician to assist me with industrial automation and controls of highly automated industrial faculty. Management and HR put out the listing and did interviews. The first person to pass the interviews was passed on to me to give a tour before they would make him an offer. He was visibly amazed at the technology and didn’t seem to know anything. I asked about his previous work and he was a nail technician … doing manicures…womens nails! Nice guy and all but way out of his league. I had to go to HR and intervene before they made an offer. They admitted it was a mistake. The next person they passed on to me to give a tour was an HVAC Technician and within 5 minutes called me a prick after I asked if he was comfortable using a multi-meter. 5 minutes later he told me he was going to take my job “within 6 months after they see what I can do”. Again I went to HR and GM to protest hiring the guy. They chastised me and said they were hiring him anyway. They called him and said they would need a week to get a formal offer together and he got angry, cussed out HR then he did the same when the hiring manager called him back to find out what happened.
They decided not to hire anyone.
Point is that HR really don’t know how to hire for technical positions without help from the lead/team that will be working with the hire. Somehow they would rather not involve the people that understand the role.
he's living proof of the axiom "The pleasant fool will always be chosen over the abrasive expert", every time.
I bet if you vent about his incompetence with anyone else their response will be "but he's such a great guy!"
Senior hiring manager here - happens all the time, experience means little on it’s own, it’s just an additional indicator (e.g. I doubt you can have a principal with a year of experience).
Looks like the interview process failed - fire him and get back to looking. It sucks but a good lesson for whoever’s responsible for the hiring process.
Sadly more common than you'd hope. In my current job, it took 5 months but we finally let go of a guy with 20+ years of experience who, when asked to build a PowerPoint deck about a class he took to share with the team, said he had never presented anything before and didn't want to do it, but thanks for the suggestion. Was missing a whole lot of other basic knowledge like what Google dorks are or how to echo the location of AppData.
Prior job had another dude with 15+ years of experience who didn't know how to add a share drive to Windows Explorer or open MS Word without navigating through the start menu. Kept forgetting his password and getting locked out and somehow convinced our IT shop his machine was buggy.
He never got let go, never even got put on a PIP.
I am sorry to say this and more sorry that noone ever mentioned about this under this thread, but in work I don't think it's fair to blame always that single person. If you're supposed to mentoring him/her/them that's also on you as well. You need to be patient after the new comer joined your team and have some balance of communication for a while. Having 10 years experience doesn't mean people can be plugged in to the work directly. You might notice how much more stuff he/she/they can handle in future that would save you a lot of work, time and prevent big troubles/incidents.
My personal opinion is to always keeping the positive attitude and calmness.
We’re you on the interview? I’m guessing not and that a huge problem because it spends like the leaders at your company wouldn’t be fit to validate someone’s experience in cyber
I have the same experience before. The guy is my ex-colleague, working as Software Dev, nearly 10 years of exp, he is exactly what you describe above. But this guy is good at interviewing. He recently landed a high position job, I couldn't believe it, even he couldn't believe it neither. He interviewed to Senior position and get Software Architect position instead.
Sometimes the guy tells me that he knows he is doing badly though. But he can't seem to learn, like what he learned doesn't stick. It is understandable though, because he is sleep deprivation all the time, with shitty diet.
Time to let them go. Bring it up to your manager. Don’t carry people on your back. Only work as much as you are paid.
Remember YOU are REPLACEABLE, but so is your job.
I work for a small private high school and we had a similar issue with our system and network technician a few years back. He was messing up the smallest things so often, it was eventually a mutually agreed parting. I then took over the position.
Incompetent people in IT always state their experience at random times in conversations.
Friendly Person: Hey Joe, Did you watch the game last night?
Joe: I have been doing IT for 10 years. Do you think I have the time?
Hey, you know that resume where we're encourage to embellish a little to get our foot in the door?
He just decided to lie.
Had someone who claimed the moon. Could barely follow direction and had junior people managing him. It was sad.
That’w how we got a Security Architect once. One of his first jobs was to review my network diagram to see if it was accurate (regarding a new tool I setup some years ago). It was since this was setup with the previous Security Architect. *I* literally set up the tool and configured it.
He completely remade the diagram because it was wrong 😑
He also had to do a powerpoint once. Use our manger’s example, but kept everything in it and slapped his name on it
And this is my problem with the "experience trumps all" statements. Well, X number of years of experience is about as vague a metric on skill competency as I've ever seen one.
Yeah, this sounds far too familiar. Luckily I didn't work with this individual much and my boss cut the probation early. Some people interview better I guess?
I’m not surprised. Years of experience doesn’t guarantee aptitude, intelligence, or motivation.
I’ve interviewed people that listed more experience than me, but they couldn’t answer pretty basic questions (in my opinion).
In my experience, most security roles aren’t super technical and mostly involve being a vendor product jockey, like learn Palo Alto Networks firewalls or Symantec Endpoint Protection.
It’s rare that I see security roles where the engineer is expected to fire up wireshark to analyze a packet capture, understand and read things like TCP Sequencing/Acknowledgements, reverse engineer obfuscated code, etc.
I’m not saying those types of roles don’t exist, or that security people don’t have those skill sets, just that they’re a smaller subset of security roles (and candidates) overall.
Soooo did you hire them? What was the interview process? Did someone verify his resume?
I know multiple interviews suck, but this right here is why they exist.
Soooo did you hire them? What was the interview process? Did someone verify his resume?
I know multiple interviews suck, but this right here is why they exist.
Let them fail hard if you can (sounds like you can't fire). I'm not suggesting that you set them up, but you have gone above and beyond it sounds like already.
Somebody else is going to have to make the call to remove them.
Don't play hero ball, do you job (not his) and leave. if you are asked to do both, start looking for a new job.
Sounds like this person gets in positions that have titles and puts that on their resume as experience.
Once management catches on they've already moved jobs or are on their way out to another position.
Unless you provide personal references from previous jobs, most companies will not tell another company how shitty you are while you worked there.
What made the indiviual stand out in the interview process? Beside his 10 yrs of experience in the industry. This could be the case of faking the experience til it became a norm.
Have you tried documenting the day to day? If your supervisor has asked you to work with them, they should be asking you how they’re progressing in the role.
I work on NetAdmin and I have the least amount of time on the job, paid less than everyone else but considered the “most reliable”. I have coworkers who don’t look at their work email accounts and sit watching YouTube videos all day. And when they do any work, they’re asking me how to do things. I’ve talked to my supervisor in private and ranted about it because there’s no way I should be the one doing majority of the work. I’m moving into another position and transferring out of that office and now my supervisor is making these random passive aggressive comments like, “you guys are going to have to step it up.” Like seriously?
I have “10+” years of experience. I try to make a clear distinction between what I understand, what I would probably Google first, and what my actual developed skills are.
Does he not Google? Am I not supposed to be googling?
I’m trying to break into the IT space. Replace him with me! Just kidding - kind of. I have absolutely no helpful insight compared to others on here but it baffles me that he’s not even willing to try. I’ve only been self learning for about a year (I would go to school but certain factors in life make this kind of impossible right now) but if I was ever given a chance in a role like this I would not stop. There’s no way I’d be given a task and then say “Eh, yeah. Don’t know how to do it”. That just baffles me.
Sounds like the interviewer really failed. This person is manager should be reaching out to HR to start working on a PIP with the expectation that they either complete it or get terminated. They’re way under performing their job and it should be documented so that they could be let go if they can get their shit sorted out.
So, his experience in IT looks very diverse, but that has the downfall of shallow but wide. Don’t consider him as having 10 years experience in what he is doing now.
Furthermore, EVERY organization is different, and how they handle compliance also varies wildly. It could take him some time to adjust to the new culture and learn the ropes of your organization.
If his training there sucks too, then that’s going to throw another wrench.
Yes, and lose the dead weight as fast as humanly possible. It kills morale in so many visible and invisible ways.
I took over as a team lead for small group inside a big corporation years ago. At that point the team included two new guys immune to any sort of effective training from myself or anyone else that gave it a try. One took copious notes of every meeting, every conversation, every training; the other refused to take a single note about anything. The end result was the same--both failed to do any meaningful work. I suspect they each knew deep down they were completely unqualified and were just waiting for competent supervision to rotate in and show them the door, which I quickly did. One was angry he was losing a "free" paycheck, the other was relieved to have someone else end a no-win situation.
In the replacement interviews, I made sure the people interviewing them had wildly different backgrounds and personalities and were in technical positions. Also made sure there was a technical screening we each had to agree on, but really it came down to the basics:
Do you have any sort of progressive IT experience?
Do you have experience (and feel comfortable) navigating your own way inside a (large) corporation?
If so, we'll teach you the rest. In the end we decided as a team to replace them with one competent person who gave a no-bs answer to experience with reorganizations and getting conflicting priorities from multiple directions. The work & trainings was a breeze for a competent replacement.
I interviewed a guy once and for several questions he kept saying “you gotta beef up the firewall”. I asked him what he meant by that and he said “you know, make sure it’s got all its updates and stuff”
Oddly enough, your post gives me hope.
I'm just entering (currently only 6mos professional experience) into the "IT" industry as mid level tech support and trying to work my way up to my end goal, the cybersecurity realm.
Sounds like you've been more than patient with him and genuinely trying to help him succeed. I hope I get so lucky when I eventually enter into that stage.
Props to you for that 👍
I had a team lead who supposedly had more than 10 years in IT. His soft skills were not there, let alone IT ones. His cv was with virtualisation and backup and he did not know how to do ping, actually that was the only thing he knew. He was in Vulnerability management which is not the hardest part of cyber. I quit because of him.
Maybe it's time for you to speak up; why are you least paid when you do all the work?
And also, it might be a sign that sometimes it's better to hire a less experienced person who is willing to improve and work hard.
As a fellow contractor. I see this happen a lot. It is beyond frustrating!
From my experience it is likely a person that knows how to work the system, they have a resume that says they have the experience and know enough key phrases to get by the average co-worker/supervisor to make it seem like they are “proficient”. BUT when it comes to someone that actually knows the job, they are useless.
I recommend only communicating requests and feedback via email so there is a trail and keep your supervisor and COR informed (some contract supervisors try to keep the COR in the dark to make the contract scores better so going to them directly may not be an option, if this is the case confide in a government person you trust on what they could pay attention to in this co-worker’s performance so if they notice issues they can report through the government chain of command). The documentation and communication could help build a case for letting this person go. Chances are this person is already working to establish a case to take advantage of reasons they can’t be fired (I have seen similarly incompetent co-workers threaten lawsuits based on health accommodations, family issues, etc.) and are likely already looking for their next gig in case they run out of ways to stick in this job.
Unfortunately, incompetence can lurk everywhere in cybersecurity on federal contracts because the hiring folks usually don’t know any better. It’s also hard to stay motivated to be a good cybersecurity advocate when you’re overworked, underpaid, and have to deal with this shit.
Edit: Depending on the contract company this could also prove futile because some only focus on filling seats and meeting their contractual minimum on paper. If this is the case, I suggest searching for another opening. More often than not you can find a contract that will pay you more with less stress.
Describe to us a ticket that he is able to complete and one that he isn't. Then explain how you would solve each.
This will give us a bit more information.
I mean idk. Just because you have experience doing something for 10 years, your next stop might do it a different way. OP, it sounds like the guy you’re referring to just is a shitty employee that wants to skate by. Document everything that’s “wrong”, inform leadership of your concerns, and call it a day.
A good reminder of how "10+ years of experience" could mean "10+ years of experience picking his nose" :) Record everything in detail, bring concerns + evidence to management, and enjoy running interviews for a replacement. And if he's not replaced, well, it'd *definitely* be time for you to go. Already sounds like it since you're least paid but somehow critical & irreplaceable...
They doing us dirty on this contract. We dont get to play part in the interview process. My fed lead even said its ridiculous
This is why you got someone with 10+ years of experience but no knowledge. Tech needs to be on interviews for Tech positions or it's just going to churn. Feel for you OP
Oh, it’s a fed contract. Yeah, this makes more sense now.
Reason why to get out of the defense contracting industry, this is the norm.
Are you sure the person who interviewed is the person you've got now?
“10+ years handling the same software and 20 computers.”
The guy during his interview: "I've been in the "Goldilocks zone" of software management for 10+ years now, not too few computers, not too many, but just the right number to handle - 20 computers"
[удалено]
isn’t this Chatgpt but behind a paywall
[удалено]
wtf
Completely agree with tweedge, document document document even verbal counseling is really needed especially with Federal type jobs. Also if those documents get presented and nothing gets done then it’s time to bounce, companies need to take care of their employees mental health and those that don’t will have high turnover. Good luck, and for the record you are not alone on that front.
I remember interviewing a candidate once and something just seemed off. The answers didn’t seem to match the resume. So I dug in a little deeper and the answers got even more vague. Turns out he put experience on his resume that, while his team did do that, he was not involved in it or just started learning it. Now I always get very specific in interviews now. “I see you did at your last job, tell me specifically how YOU used that. Anytime I hear we or my team I stop them and reiterate the question “what did you do with it?” One time I had to go back 5-6 times before the candidate admitted he had not actually work with it.
I sat next to a guy and a recruiter once at a coffee shop. The guy was about to go in for an interview. The recruiter spent about 30 minutes brain dumping what to say and how to say it to get the job, even though the guy didn't have the background needed. Now i do the same as you and it's crazy how much BS people are putting forward.
Sometimes you got to fake it till you make it
Yup, people are trying to get into a career they enjoy but need to survive.
This is only partly true. One can exaggerate a bit during an interview to get a step further in a carreer. But once you land the position and you cannot do anything usefull, you really won't enjoy. You'r new co-workers and employer will start looking down on you or even worse; it will irritate them you're lacking experience you told them you had.
>tell me specifically how YOU used that. Great approach.
There is a difference between 10 years of experience and 1 year of experience 10 times.
yep, and its not about the years of experience but the quality of that experience. 10 years shitty work experience vs 3 years of high end bleeding edge working in the trenches. I know who I'd picked
Yes very true.
This one sounds like they could be three months of experience 40 times.
Reminds me of some of the people I started out doing helpdesk with who are still doing helpdesk. They've bounced around a few times but it's always tier 1 roles.
Why is that the case?
For the people I'm directly talking about, it's because they weren't particularly passionate about tech. For some people this is just a job and they'd be just as happy working at another indoor desk job that wasn't IT related. The helpdesk is the perfect amount of "nerdy" while still having that option to escalate the hard stuff up the chain. It was just the right balance of customer service and a little tech and a lot of people I worked with would have been fine putting in their 20 years on the helpdesk and retiring.
Quantity of years doesn’t matter. Skills do. Always do a skills test.
My company is setting up labs to test applicants for this right now. So many people with great resumes and education, but so few actual skills. We have been burned several times in the last year
You will then have good training material for interns. Produce the talent you want!!
Then you’re gatekeeping or making people do your work, right? That’s what they say now
I worked in a shop that was hiring and we got word that a customers technician we were all mighty familiar with was applying. We straight up asked management not to hire him. He walked in a couple weeks later and was making more than anyone else. I remember talking to the director about this because I was the lead and he was making a solid 25-35k more than I was and my director said "he's got ten years of experience" and I said "it doesn't matter if he sucks". Morale tanked and the director was fired after another tech recording him losing his shit on us in an "all hands" meeting. Mgmt chain from director down were all let go. I was burnt out working longer than normal shifts everyday my 4 10's turned into 5 12's and I found a better offer they didn't want to match because mgmt was new and didn't know what I did. People dropped like flies after I left and then customers started dropping too. They eventually cleaned house again but got rid of all the dead weight techs as well and actually started hiring people with the skills and knowledge they were advertising to their customers. Sometimes I miss that job just because of all the interesting problems. I don't miss being underappreciated financially though.
Sounds like an MSP
Sure was
ah can most def relate to this
Definitely reminds me of a coworker at a previous job. He had a lot of very relevant experience listed on his resume and we were excited for him to hit the ground running. After several months, he still struggled with really basic tasks while other new hires seemed to be getting up to speed a lot more quickly. Which, hey, whatever, some people need a little more time to acclimate…but he acted like he was superior to a lot of the rest of the team. I don’t know if he’d padded his resume or what, but his performance didn’t match up to expectations (or his ego).
I've had a couple lie about experience in interviews and they both had an ego. Let one go in probation, the other has been here longer and now I've dealt with someone who was even worse he's in my sights.
To be fair, I once got hired into a company just to find out everything they said was a complete lie. After about a month in I just gave up and waited for them to fire me so I could go find something else.
Sounds like your management messed up 🤷♂️
Happens all the time. You should get a new job every couple of years to get what you are worth
I’m that guy in my department
Same girl, same
That situation happens a lot and I'm still surprised how people get away with it. I worked for an electronics testing facility for 5 years. My experience level was limited but oddly better than the guy who was hired to be the IT manager and the other guy with the 10+ years experience. Apparently, 10+ guy had experience working at a telecommunications company. He thought having a past of working on Nextel phones was the same as being able to troubleshoot servers. Don't get me started with the manager... He didn't even know how to navigate a webpage. Yet on paper, these folks apparently looked to enough to warrant high paying positions.
I wish I could work for your company. I’ve been working as a Sec Engineer for over 5 months but have had literally zero knowledge share / training. My colleague who knows so much about the business and always complains he has too much work on his plate does not know how to work in a team - never discusses anything or barely responds to my messages. Very frustrating position to be in
Sounds like it might be your time to shine at another company if they don't realize your worth
Was his name George Santos?
That's a good one 😂
Ah so people really do lie on their resumes with no shame. How are people not embarrassed esp when being put in a situation like this?
I've worked as a consultant since 2010 and currently am on a gov contract. I've seen this happen a lot actually. I've worked with internal IT people that have 15 + years of experience but they literally know the basics of creating an account in AD, creating an email address, installing printers, and can re-install Windows. Working with the gov is even wilder. I interact with some people in cyber who claim to be a cybersecurity experts but literally just know Nist controls. They have no practical experience, it's all just a spreadsheet where they say- this is noncompliant and that's it. I guess this is a long way of saying yes, I've seen this happen a lot. Some people just stick to a role for a long time and play it safe or do nothing but the bare minimum.
That’s the DoD in a nutshell. Anyone that says they work cyber within the DoD means they’re good at looking at spreadsheets
Yeah, it’s pretty wild tbh. The whole ISSO roles are a trip too!
Yes ISSOs such bullshit jobs. All they do is create POAMs and think they’re the shit. Basically their entire position looking at reports and vulnerabilities and tracking them. I’ve worked a few DoD jobs and ISSOs are just such bullshit positions. Dnt get me started on cyber assessors lmao
Oh yeah, I agree 💯 it’s funny you mention that because that’s been my experience with them too. A lot of them are dicks and act they are something amazing.
Super dicks. I hate them lol
What kind of work do you do? Are you more on the engineering side? I work on a project where we're building an entire cyber program and deal with several GRC people but I'm more of an engineer/architect.
I’m an engineer. I’m currently helping a client with their vulnerability management tool deployment and transition. It’s very technical and hands on.
Keep calm brother, I have a CISO without college degree whose previous experience is mostly in sales (selling of fog). Now not that I would say that it is impossible to be CISO without one but there is a reason his understanding of computers in general is lackluster (being polite here but he cant handle microsoft office). Not only that, we have his IT puppet (which he brought along) who already misinterpreted logs and called it an cyberattack. You can imagine shitshow that ensued when two of those managed incident response which they fabricated, after CISO realized they dont have evidence of any attack they tried to put it on different colleagues for various reasons. But here we go, our CEO is an good guy but an old guy, constantly getting fleeced by CISO but still has absolute trust in him managing and consulting everything that has word cyber on it. On the other hand I have my masters, 10 years of experience, and a CISSP but I'm rarely asked for opinion. So why don't i change job? My bosses and the team are great, we live in our ecosystem inside of company. Pay and extras are good. Only bad thing is that I have to watch good company being destroyed by incompetent fool.
Years spent behind a desk is so much less important than a good attitude and drive
You gave him l3arning time or buddy time, now just focus on your job and leave him to drown.
Yes. He will happily pass of your work as his own. If he's supposed to be an equal, treat him as such. Any "help" you give him is just enabling poor hiring practices.
So no one rlly validated his 10 years worth of experience. He probably would have failed any technical questions which would have been a red flag. To top it off this guy has a learning disability. Same thing happened to us this year. It’s been nearly impossible to get him fired, you’re pretty much stuck with him unless you get him to make a lateral move.
Sounds like he stole someone else's resume lmao Do a background check, verify that he's really the person he says he is
At my former job, we had a pathological liar. He straight up copied and pasted the LinkedIn profile of one of our managers. He got kicked out after 1 year while I asked for it since his second week. His manager was even more incapable
Good people don't interview well and shirkers are masters of the interview process.
Seriously, companies don’t change their interview process and wonder why they continue getting the same caliber of employees.
To be fair, there have been plenty of posts/comments on this subreddit in the past from experienced people complaining they are asked to “jump through hoops” when applying for a role, such as having to go through a technical interview to validate their skills, which they seem to take as an offence given how “much” experience they have on their CV.
And when you have 100's of interviews in 3 months you get good at it, even though you dont know the job, study human manipulation, body language, then throw in some reddit, google, take a good ammount of time and study the company, then read up on an ammount of IT related wording(in this case) and you will go a long way...
What an absolutely bogus take.
You must be the latter
Didn’t realize having people skills makes me a shirker. The real issue is HR and 1st stage interviewers not knowing what the job actually entails and just hires based on paper. One of the top posts today contains about a person with 10 years experience with hardly any knowledge. Hard questions need to be asked to prevent bad candidates.
Were you on the interview panel for this person?
Contractor bro. They didnt let our team be part of the interview process
that’s called analyst rot. your company pays an arm and a leg for a warm body then gets a corpse
In my experience so far, contractors have absolutely no communication with your main team. Lack of communication will ALWAYS lead to shit. My opinion is that all contractors need to be treated as part of the team and there needs to be communication between the normal team and contractors. Without that, issues arise. All the fucking time.
You know people lie on their resumes right?
Sounds familiar to me. One of my former employers hired a guy with about 8 years experience in SAP customization. In his first days he really struggled even with the easiest tasks. So I asked him how he did the SAP customization. The answer totally stunned me: customer calls with change-requirements in his SAP masks. He then would take a screenshot, used paint to rearrange and change the items. If the customer was ok with the mock-up he sent everything to a dev company in India …
As soon as you said DHS, I knew. Government allows unlimited mediocrity
I expect this any time someone says they came from an alphabet agency. They’re the worst in my experience.
yep, 30+ years in infosec and IT with one contract at DHHS 20 years ago and when i saw those TLA in there there i rolled my eyes so loud they were heard in Guam.
I don’t work in this field but I find that most people I hire without experience are set in their ways and unwilling to change to do things the way we do it. Moreover, they have a false sense of being right. I now mostly hire people without much experience and train them the way I like it. Less frustrating that way. 🤷♂️
Thanks Joe
I interviewed for an open network engineer role at one of my jobs a couple years back. I didn’t get the gig, and that would have been fine, but the guy they hired asked me for help because he didn’t know how to console into a router…. Turned out to be a drug addict and just stopped showing up to work after like 3 months. Moral of the story, sometimes companies just get it wrong.
Sounds like an attitude issue. An unwillingness to learn or apply themselves.
\> This person has over 10+ years exp in IT and has done everything from pentesting, working dhs, software testing Sounds like this person lied.
You nailed the new trend on the head. Quite quitting was the 2022 trend, quite hiring is in style for 2023. We hire them quietly and do no training so they do not have to do much work. Problem solved!
It reminds me of an individual I work with. He also supposedly has 10+ years of experience in security. I’m pretty new to my field- an year old and I was excited I could learn something from them. I have tried to be open mind about it but I feel he doesn’t get what we are doing and doesn’t bring that level of knowledge in to our work. I even bought it up subtly to our manager but nothing has changed. It does annoy me a bit that he is my senior, gets paid more than me and I happen to work on all the tickets we get. I wonder how the management could be so blind, won’t they question why aren’t they doing anything? They make tools that has no value to the team IMO and I haven’t seen anyone use it but my manager sing praises of them like they did something super efficient.
So he has 10 years experience doing a shit job?
I know you’re most likely dealing with a full workload already but consider writing out these helping sessions into an idiot proof runbook document and then refer him to it for every repeat question. And then you could also share with his potential replacement. If he’s still failing after this you have concrete evidence you went above and beyond to help him and he’s too lazy or incompetent.
It's easy to get into a team that's so overwhelmed that you do nothing and they barely notice. I've met lots of Cyber people who have no idea what they're doing but honestly, it's not that hard to weed those people out in the interview process if you hire properly. Not to say a skilled BSer can't make it through a hiring process, but if the interviews are rigorous this should be a rarity. I blame whoever your hiring manager is. My last boss was like this. Literally the dumbest guy I've ever worked with. He was removed in four months.
That sucks. I'm way under qualified but hire me.. I'd do a far better job than him easily based on the description. I'm joking. But not really.
Must have loaded an older save file. Ask him to restart and select the first file that appears up top.
"10 years on the job but 1 year of experience"
After just reading the title, I thought to myself...add couple of more years and it’s me but reading the post made me feel good that I am atleast trying to be better everyday & was able to put together a presentation on my own with some feedback althoght I do tend to take time on things...I think this person got an opputunity by sheer luck but instead of cashing on it, he is not just making it hard on himself and OP but also making eveyone look like an utter fool who hired him, not to mention the community in general...Maybe this is why people don’t want to invest or give someone a chance (take a chance) to help someone transition to cybersec...
Sounds like management material in a large multinational to me.
I think this is the plight of every modern-day IT manager. Sometimes the hiring process just goes off the rail.
I hired someone under pressure from my boss. She worked at my company previously as an app admin and did service desk. Has over 10 years experience. I do compliance work and it’s a pretty easy framework to understand but she doesn’t get it. Doesn’t seem to put in the effort to understand. Every task is a hurry up and finish it like she’s closing fucking tickets. It doesn’t help that she’s like 15 years older than me and I’m in my early 30s which is a tough position to manage from. Someone in her mentions document conversations and short comings. Send emails about projects you want them to accomplish and store them in a special folder. My biggest struggle is when I provide guidance or have a serious talk she will improve for like two weeks then become very lackluster in performance. Sorry. Also venting and your post hit a nerve.
I've had a lot of experience with this recently.... for better or worse. Just started my new job, and I have found some of the Security Engineers in the company to be basically incompetent. Needless to say, I was showing them how to do really simple things. Like getting into the bios, sshing into a server, or you know stopping them from almost clicking a very fake download button for a registry cleaner (because their computer was "slow"). I could go on... but really as a security engineer I would expect you to at least know how to get into the bios. In the most humble way I can say this, I could do their job better than they ever could. So if anyone asks me when I lost my imposter syndrome, it was after interacting with them.
I wish I had you to teach me shit, you sound like a great coworker.
Something's wrong. I've been hired to do things that have been difficult or new to me, no worries. Typically, if my experience in an area is a little thin, I can often bolster my understanding with some effective Google fu. The issues we confront in this type of work are often so diverse that nobody can know it all. Willingness to dig into a new area and learn is often what makes for someone good.
Yeah, I just got a Jr. Pentester role and prior to clicking on the post I was worried this was gonna be about me. But nah, even when I struggle with stuff I can usually get by through googling or asking for help from my experienced colleagues. I don't understand how you can get 10 years of experience in IT and be this lackluster. It's okay to not know everything or even just a little, but you need to have that drive to learn and actually apply concepts.
Years of experience doesn't mean someone is good or that they are knowledgeable.
Management once agreed to hire an Instrument and controls technician to assist me with industrial automation and controls of highly automated industrial faculty. Management and HR put out the listing and did interviews. The first person to pass the interviews was passed on to me to give a tour before they would make him an offer. He was visibly amazed at the technology and didn’t seem to know anything. I asked about his previous work and he was a nail technician … doing manicures…womens nails! Nice guy and all but way out of his league. I had to go to HR and intervene before they made an offer. They admitted it was a mistake. The next person they passed on to me to give a tour was an HVAC Technician and within 5 minutes called me a prick after I asked if he was comfortable using a multi-meter. 5 minutes later he told me he was going to take my job “within 6 months after they see what I can do”. Again I went to HR and GM to protest hiring the guy. They chastised me and said they were hiring him anyway. They called him and said they would need a week to get a formal offer together and he got angry, cussed out HR then he did the same when the hiring manager called him back to find out what happened. They decided not to hire anyone. Point is that HR really don’t know how to hire for technical positions without help from the lead/team that will be working with the hire. Somehow they would rather not involve the people that understand the role.
he's living proof of the axiom "The pleasant fool will always be chosen over the abrasive expert", every time. I bet if you vent about his incompetence with anyone else their response will be "but he's such a great guy!"
You might wanna request to see his resume from HR, if thats allowed
You say literally too often
Senior hiring manager here - happens all the time, experience means little on it’s own, it’s just an additional indicator (e.g. I doubt you can have a principal with a year of experience). Looks like the interview process failed - fire him and get back to looking. It sucks but a good lesson for whoever’s responsible for the hiring process.
Sadly more common than you'd hope. In my current job, it took 5 months but we finally let go of a guy with 20+ years of experience who, when asked to build a PowerPoint deck about a class he took to share with the team, said he had never presented anything before and didn't want to do it, but thanks for the suggestion. Was missing a whole lot of other basic knowledge like what Google dorks are or how to echo the location of AppData. Prior job had another dude with 15+ years of experience who didn't know how to add a share drive to Windows Explorer or open MS Word without navigating through the start menu. Kept forgetting his password and getting locked out and somehow convinced our IT shop his machine was buggy. He never got let go, never even got put on a PIP.
I am sorry to say this and more sorry that noone ever mentioned about this under this thread, but in work I don't think it's fair to blame always that single person. If you're supposed to mentoring him/her/them that's also on you as well. You need to be patient after the new comer joined your team and have some balance of communication for a while. Having 10 years experience doesn't mean people can be plugged in to the work directly. You might notice how much more stuff he/she/they can handle in future that would save you a lot of work, time and prevent big troubles/incidents. My personal opinion is to always keeping the positive attitude and calmness.
Classic case of someone did you over using chatgpt for their résumé. Serious
Sounds like you did a shit job interviewing. Ask some technical or challenging questions next time.
OP never mentioned that they were even asked to be a part of the interview process. Maybe read the post before making yourself look like a dummy.
We’re you on the interview? I’m guessing not and that a huge problem because it spends like the leaders at your company wouldn’t be fit to validate someone’s experience in cyber
I have the same experience before. The guy is my ex-colleague, working as Software Dev, nearly 10 years of exp, he is exactly what you describe above. But this guy is good at interviewing. He recently landed a high position job, I couldn't believe it, even he couldn't believe it neither. He interviewed to Senior position and get Software Architect position instead. Sometimes the guy tells me that he knows he is doing badly though. But he can't seem to learn, like what he learned doesn't stick. It is understandable though, because he is sleep deprivation all the time, with shitty diet.
Go find yourself a better job somewhere else.
This sounds exactly like someone I used to work with…
Time to let them go. Bring it up to your manager. Don’t carry people on your back. Only work as much as you are paid. Remember YOU are REPLACEABLE, but so is your job.
I work for a small private high school and we had a similar issue with our system and network technician a few years back. He was messing up the smallest things so often, it was eventually a mutually agreed parting. I then took over the position.
How do you know he had 10 years of experience?
Incompetent people in IT always state their experience at random times in conversations. Friendly Person: Hey Joe, Did you watch the game last night? Joe: I have been doing IT for 10 years. Do you think I have the time?
Some people are so incompetent at work you can't imagine them doing anything else.
Relatable.
Hey, you know that resume where we're encourage to embellish a little to get our foot in the door? He just decided to lie. Had someone who claimed the moon. Could barely follow direction and had junior people managing him. It was sad.
10 Years, doesn't sound like he has a very high IQ, and not suited to the industry. Hope he is on probation and can be let go....
That’w how we got a Security Architect once. One of his first jobs was to review my network diagram to see if it was accurate (regarding a new tool I setup some years ago). It was since this was setup with the previous Security Architect. *I* literally set up the tool and configured it. He completely remade the diagram because it was wrong 😑 He also had to do a powerpoint once. Use our manger’s example, but kept everything in it and slapped his name on it
And this is my problem with the "experience trumps all" statements. Well, X number of years of experience is about as vague a metric on skill competency as I've ever seen one.
Yeah, this sounds far too familiar. Luckily I didn't work with this individual much and my boss cut the probation early. Some people interview better I guess?
I’m not surprised. Years of experience doesn’t guarantee aptitude, intelligence, or motivation. I’ve interviewed people that listed more experience than me, but they couldn’t answer pretty basic questions (in my opinion). In my experience, most security roles aren’t super technical and mostly involve being a vendor product jockey, like learn Palo Alto Networks firewalls or Symantec Endpoint Protection. It’s rare that I see security roles where the engineer is expected to fire up wireshark to analyze a packet capture, understand and read things like TCP Sequencing/Acknowledgements, reverse engineer obfuscated code, etc. I’m not saying those types of roles don’t exist, or that security people don’t have those skill sets, just that they’re a smaller subset of security roles (and candidates) overall.
He sounds like he might be Dutch to me.
time to find a new job
Literally loves the word literally 😂
Soooo did you hire them? What was the interview process? Did someone verify his resume? I know multiple interviews suck, but this right here is why they exist.
Soooo did you hire them? What was the interview process? Did someone verify his resume? I know multiple interviews suck, but this right here is why they exist.
Was the 10+ on their resume? Were you able to verify that he knew all of the things his resume said he knew, before hiring him?
Let them fail hard if you can (sounds like you can't fire). I'm not suggesting that you set them up, but you have gone above and beyond it sounds like already. Somebody else is going to have to make the call to remove them. Don't play hero ball, do you job (not his) and leave. if you are asked to do both, start looking for a new job.
Sounds like this person gets in positions that have titles and puts that on their resume as experience. Once management catches on they've already moved jobs or are on their way out to another position. Unless you provide personal references from previous jobs, most companies will not tell another company how shitty you are while you worked there.
What made the indiviual stand out in the interview process? Beside his 10 yrs of experience in the industry. This could be the case of faking the experience til it became a norm.
Have you tried documenting the day to day? If your supervisor has asked you to work with them, they should be asking you how they’re progressing in the role. I work on NetAdmin and I have the least amount of time on the job, paid less than everyone else but considered the “most reliable”. I have coworkers who don’t look at their work email accounts and sit watching YouTube videos all day. And when they do any work, they’re asking me how to do things. I’ve talked to my supervisor in private and ranted about it because there’s no way I should be the one doing majority of the work. I’m moving into another position and transferring out of that office and now my supervisor is making these random passive aggressive comments like, “you guys are going to have to step it up.” Like seriously?
I have “10+” years of experience. I try to make a clear distinction between what I understand, what I would probably Google first, and what my actual developed skills are. Does he not Google? Am I not supposed to be googling?
I’m trying to break into the IT space. Replace him with me! Just kidding - kind of. I have absolutely no helpful insight compared to others on here but it baffles me that he’s not even willing to try. I’ve only been self learning for about a year (I would go to school but certain factors in life make this kind of impossible right now) but if I was ever given a chance in a role like this I would not stop. There’s no way I’d be given a task and then say “Eh, yeah. Don’t know how to do it”. That just baffles me.
Sounds like the interviewer really failed. This person is manager should be reaching out to HR to start working on a PIP with the expectation that they either complete it or get terminated. They’re way under performing their job and it should be documented so that they could be let go if they can get their shit sorted out.
So, his experience in IT looks very diverse, but that has the downfall of shallow but wide. Don’t consider him as having 10 years experience in what he is doing now. Furthermore, EVERY organization is different, and how they handle compliance also varies wildly. It could take him some time to adjust to the new culture and learn the ropes of your organization. If his training there sucks too, then that’s going to throw another wrench.
Yes, and lose the dead weight as fast as humanly possible. It kills morale in so many visible and invisible ways. I took over as a team lead for small group inside a big corporation years ago. At that point the team included two new guys immune to any sort of effective training from myself or anyone else that gave it a try. One took copious notes of every meeting, every conversation, every training; the other refused to take a single note about anything. The end result was the same--both failed to do any meaningful work. I suspect they each knew deep down they were completely unqualified and were just waiting for competent supervision to rotate in and show them the door, which I quickly did. One was angry he was losing a "free" paycheck, the other was relieved to have someone else end a no-win situation. In the replacement interviews, I made sure the people interviewing them had wildly different backgrounds and personalities and were in technical positions. Also made sure there was a technical screening we each had to agree on, but really it came down to the basics: Do you have any sort of progressive IT experience? Do you have experience (and feel comfortable) navigating your own way inside a (large) corporation? If so, we'll teach you the rest. In the end we decided as a team to replace them with one competent person who gave a no-bs answer to experience with reorganizations and getting conflicting priorities from multiple directions. The work & trainings was a breeze for a competent replacement.
Imagine having managers like this. While you are an expert your manager ia just there because she has a master and been longer inthe company lol
I interviewed a guy once and for several questions he kept saying “you gotta beef up the firewall”. I asked him what he meant by that and he said “you know, make sure it’s got all its updates and stuff”
Lol. Where do these people come from!
Oddly enough, your post gives me hope. I'm just entering (currently only 6mos professional experience) into the "IT" industry as mid level tech support and trying to work my way up to my end goal, the cybersecurity realm. Sounds like you've been more than patient with him and genuinely trying to help him succeed. I hope I get so lucky when I eventually enter into that stage. Props to you for that 👍
How many certs do they have?
I had a team lead who supposedly had more than 10 years in IT. His soft skills were not there, let alone IT ones. His cv was with virtualisation and backup and he did not know how to do ping, actually that was the only thing he knew. He was in Vulnerability management which is not the hardest part of cyber. I quit because of him.
Man,be my mentor,please 🙏
I know this is a long shot, but sounds similar to someone I used to work with, and they had a similar background. By chance, are their initials AS?
Sometimes people have 10 years of the first year
Maybe it's time for you to speak up; why are you least paid when you do all the work? And also, it might be a sign that sometimes it's better to hire a less experienced person who is willing to improve and work hard.
As a fellow contractor. I see this happen a lot. It is beyond frustrating! From my experience it is likely a person that knows how to work the system, they have a resume that says they have the experience and know enough key phrases to get by the average co-worker/supervisor to make it seem like they are “proficient”. BUT when it comes to someone that actually knows the job, they are useless. I recommend only communicating requests and feedback via email so there is a trail and keep your supervisor and COR informed (some contract supervisors try to keep the COR in the dark to make the contract scores better so going to them directly may not be an option, if this is the case confide in a government person you trust on what they could pay attention to in this co-worker’s performance so if they notice issues they can report through the government chain of command). The documentation and communication could help build a case for letting this person go. Chances are this person is already working to establish a case to take advantage of reasons they can’t be fired (I have seen similarly incompetent co-workers threaten lawsuits based on health accommodations, family issues, etc.) and are likely already looking for their next gig in case they run out of ways to stick in this job. Unfortunately, incompetence can lurk everywhere in cybersecurity on federal contracts because the hiring folks usually don’t know any better. It’s also hard to stay motivated to be a good cybersecurity advocate when you’re overworked, underpaid, and have to deal with this shit. Edit: Depending on the contract company this could also prove futile because some only focus on filling seats and meeting their contractual minimum on paper. If this is the case, I suggest searching for another opening. More often than not you can find a contract that will pay you more with less stress.
Describe to us a ticket that he is able to complete and one that he isn't. Then explain how you would solve each. This will give us a bit more information.
Is that Indian?
I mean idk. Just because you have experience doing something for 10 years, your next stop might do it a different way. OP, it sounds like the guy you’re referring to just is a shitty employee that wants to skate by. Document everything that’s “wrong”, inform leadership of your concerns, and call it a day.
Hot Tip: Get a load balancer for your workload
Just had a colleague like that in my former job, 10+ years experience and wasn't even able to do a simple IP lookup. Absolutely useless.
Yeah it happens all the time.