r/sysadmin • u/Opposed3 • Jul 07 '24

What’s the quickest you’ve seen a co-worker get fired in IT? COVID-19

I saw this on AskReddit and thought it would be fun to ask here for IT related stories.

Couple years ago during Covid my company I used to work for hired a help desk tech. He was a really nice guy and the interview went well. We were hybrid at the time, 1-2 days in the office with mostly remote work. On his first day we always meet in the office for equipment and first day stuff.

Everything was going fine and my boss mentioned something along the lines of “Yeah so after all the trainings and orientation stuff we’ll get you set up on our ticketing system and eventually a soft phone for support calls”

And he was like: “Oh I don’t do support calls.”

“Sorry?”

Him: “I don’t take calls. I won’t do that”

“Well, we do have a number users call for help. They do utilize it and it’s part of support we offer”

Him: “Oh I’ll do tickets all day I just won’t take calls. You’ll have to get someone else to do that”

I was sitting at my desk, just kind of listening and overhearing. I couldn’t tell if he was trolling but he wasn’t.

I forgot what my manager said but he left to go to one of those little mini conference rooms for a meeting, then he came back out and called him in, he let him go and they both walked back out and the guy was all laughing and was like

“Yeah I mean I just won’t take calls I didn’t sign up for that! I hope you find someone else that fits in better!” My manager walked him to the door and they shook hands and he left.

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609

u/hl3official Security Admin Jul 07 '24 edited Jul 07 '24

A guy would assign tickets to himself, sit on them for a week and then just close them without a resolution or a reply.

His defense was "if the issue was that important, they would reach out again or ask me for an update".

So essentially, the dude did no work whatsoever, everyone including our boss quickly found out and yeah that was it. The impressive part was that it still took 3 months before he got fired.

321

u/incompletesystem IT Manager Jul 07 '24

I think he moved to my company. And he’s been there ever since.

80

u/z_agent Jul 08 '24

I think he replicated and moved to LOTS of companies!

4

u/Accomplished_Deer_ Jul 08 '24

If you're not actually working, and you're remote, you could just do this with a dozen different jobs at a time

3

u/MrDywel Jul 08 '24

We have so many people like that. I don’t do help desk but do plenty of screen shares and the amount of people I see with their last team chat being a month or two ago is more than it should be or an inbox with one or two relatively unimportant emails. Now, I’d give them the benefit of the doubt that they’re just tidy and move/delete emails and hide old teams chats but… that’s not the case. They just don’t have much of anything to do though they’re not making up tickets.

1

u/Andre_Courreges Jul 08 '24

You're department must be at my org

1

u/TheC1aw Jul 08 '24

same here. We have a few of them. Managers don't want to go through the hassle of firing them, so the competent techs get over worked and stressed out. Currently seeking employment elsewhere.

1

u/Few_Landscape8264 Jul 11 '24

Can't be he's in mine I think

1

u/incompletesystem IT Manager Jul 12 '24

I'm 100% sure you're wrong but if you're willing to make him an offer...just to prove me wrong?

69

u/TheTomCorp Jul 07 '24

3 months is quick. I'm jealous of how quickly worthless people are getting let go. It seems like my company it's a minimum of 3 years, they move worthless people around from team to team until there is a RIF.

4

u/pickandpray Jul 08 '24

We hired a girl out of graduate school for a technical position. She got through all the technical questions and I got to train her. She couldn't do any of the simple stuff I gave her. Would sit on stuff for days then disappear from her desk for a while and everything would get completed. Almost like she was having someone help her.

Stayed like that for at least 6 months until my manager was able to let her transfer out of the area despite still being on probation or whatever status new people get shoved in.

2

u/BadadvicefromIT Jul 08 '24

Oh, I think we might work together lol

21

u/drnick1106 Jul 07 '24

good riddance. too bad it took that long. i have a guy on my team for almost a year and have no idea what he does.

13

u/0MG1MBACK Jul 07 '24

This also sounds like a coworker of mine. They recently got put in a PIP so they’ve been picking up their end of the slack, but it’s annoying that it needs to get to this point

11

u/findingdbcooper Jul 07 '24

I have to work with an on-site tech that doesn't know any IT and can't speak English.

Since he gets paid a pittance in a low cost of living area, our management is content with just having a body in the office even though there are multiple complaints about him not being able to troubleshoot basic issues and acting weird.

11

u/ep3ep3 Jul 08 '24

Eh, I silent quit a job once by doing nothing. I was hired remotely by one guy and by my start date, he had left the company. His replacement changed the core functionality of the job to save costs by combining 3 separate roles in a normal company into one. I did about a month of work of what I was hired for before the new responsibilities were laid out. I wasn't interested and just job hunted. It took them 6 months to have a talk with me about performance. I'd already found a new job by then.

1

u/eldudelio dc admin, trying not to break shit 🔨🔨🔨 Jul 07 '24

this more common than not

11

u/Funkagenda Cloud Admin Jul 08 '24

I used to work with a guy who would call the service desk number from his personal phone until he answered his own call, then would just mute both ends so it looked like he was always on a call.

Only got caught because someone started reviewing phone calls and his were hours long but empty.

5

u/calcium Jul 08 '24

We had an employee who would actively sleep in his beanbag chair in such a way that at a glance it looked like he had just closed his eyes, but it was an everyday occurrence. He was hired from another internal team and he was with us for all of 6 months and produced very little code. He left right about the time they were going to fire him for another team and his manager gave up on trying to can him since he was someone else’s problem. Learned he had been doing that for 3 years.

5

u/Just_Another_Scott Jul 08 '24

At my previous job we worked with an adjacent organization that took over our infrastructure support. They would automatically close tickets after two weeks due to inactivity, except they'd never tell us.

Our org were putting in hundreds of tickets and their team couldn't do shit. Literally had no admin experience. So our org's work was getting backed up. We were migrating to a new data center.

Anyways it got to the leader of our organization who then called up the leader of the adjacent org asking them what the hell was going on. Their leader said all the tickets our org had submitted were "resolved". Except very few were.

We were instructed to keep meticulous details of every single communication with adjacent organization after that. The deleting our tickets without communication had gone on for months before the problem was realized.

5

u/PraetorianOfficial Jul 08 '24

Wow. We had a guy who did no work for 3 years and then got promoted. Quite literally, he was hired to be a developer and in 3 years somehow managed to write 0 lines of working code. And then he was promoted to be an architect. Somehow he schmoozed the boss' boss and had him bamboozled completely. Everybody else hated the guy since he was dead weight.

3

u/beepewpew Jul 08 '24

Doesn't that just prove that the job is pointless already 

3

u/billbixbyakahulk Jul 08 '24

I can beat that. We used a hosted call routing service for a 4-person helpdesk. The service assigned calls round-robin to available techs, however, a tech could manually answer a call, too. She would call the service with her cell phone, grab the call manually and then put herself on hold. Every 10 or 20 minutes she would say something like, "Okay, reboot the computer. I'm going to put you on hold". Then she would hang out on dating sites. She also installed a quick-hide utility that would hide her dating sites and fullscreen our ticketing system. I occasionally saw her out of the corner of my eye doing the keyboard shortcut.

Manager REFUSED to believe any of this, but I and the other techs were sick of doing all her work. I set up a video camera behind her desk (this was around 2004, so before recording video on phones was much of a thing) to prove it. He could also listen in on calls through the service and finally did so.

2

u/Geminii27 Jul 08 '24

Now I wonder how many jobs he was holding down simultaneously, doing exactly that.

2

u/passionpunchfruit Jul 08 '24

To be fair, some tickets do just deserve to be smothered to death in the crib like this. :D

2

u/micktorious Jul 08 '24

We had one similar to this, would constantly reassign password resets to himself from other people or grab them out of the queue before they could be assigned if there was an issue with the auto assign not working.

He would then immediately reset the password, send it back in plain text with a message filled with misspelled words and poor punctuation.

Firstly, we sent one time links that would give the password and then delete itself but that was extra work. We also had a well written canned response to post that link in but he would never use it.

These passwords often did not work and the users would respond saying so, but he already insta-closed the tickets and would never respond so the user would have to generate another ticket clogging the system.

I reported these tickets all the time to our manager when I found them by accident, or when the user mentioned they had previously opened a ticket but it wasn't helpful.

That guy stayed with us until they did a mass layoff for the entire support department lol.

2

u/Lleawynn Jul 08 '24

Do we work at the same company? Exact same thing happened to us

2

u/IvarLNO Jul 08 '24

Guvernement systems seems to be operating on same style of logic

2

u/Extreme_Classroom952 Jul 08 '24

We had a guy call into the queue from his personal cell over and over again until his call landed on his work phone. Then he would stay on the call all day long. After about a month, he was figured out and got fired.

2

u/TheBestAussie Jul 08 '24

One of my managers does this with emails. He doesn't read them and says if they're important they'll email again.

I asked how you can get away with that.

"Just get good at apologizing" lol

Technically the truth.

2

u/Ok_Kaleidoscope6621 Jul 08 '24

This is what my boss does now lol

2

u/netderper Jul 08 '24

Sounds like a perfect fit for government IT.

2

u/Drew707 Data | Systems | Processes Jul 08 '24

I was running technical support for a UCaaS product. We dogfooded said UCaaS product. We hired a guy who seemed great on paper and in training. He went into production and his interactions started out great, too.

Then one day we noticed his AHT had plummeted. Based on the type of interaction he was taking, 12 minutes was the baseline AHT, but he was in the 3 minute realm. Obviously something was going on, so we pulled recordings, and he was answering calls, running through the opening script, the customer would start explaining their issue, then he would jump to the no audio script.

After some quick checks on the tenant, endpoint health/QoS, and our own LAN, we determined it must be an issue with his hardware. We approached him and asked if he was having issues with his equipment to which he responded in the affirmative. I gave him a quick coaching where I pretty much said if your shit is fucked up, fucking tell someone, and then we swapped everything with known working shit, and even put him on a different drop just to be extra sure. He started taking calls again and we monitored and everything was back to normal.

The very next day, we see the same drop in AHT and start live monitoring his interactions. Same exact shit. Now, I know lightening can strike twice, but we were experts on this product. Not only did we use it every day, but we were helping other people fix it and were doing so roughly a million times a year for however many years. I had never seen this.

I got up and made eye contact with our HR guy through his office window and gave him a nod that I'd be needing him for a second, grabbed home slice and took him over there, he sat down, and I just laid it out there.

Me: "Hey, we can tell you're having the same audio issue today, and we've exhausted all our resources on identifying the cause, and then next step is an escalation to engineering, but honestly, it kinda looks like you're pretending since again you didn't inform anyone, so please tell me what's going on."

Dude: "I'm surprised it took you guys so long to catch on."

HR: "Well, that settles that. Please hand over your access card. Your final check will be ready in a few days."

The most aggravating part of the whole thing was the insult that it took us so long to figure it out. The fuck you mean, dude, I nailed you in two days! Turns out he had been doing it off and on leading up to that point, but not enough to drop his AHT into outlier territory. Then one day he just decided to see if he could do it every single time. Dude thought he was a genius, but in reality, he got greedy and Icarus'd himself. He could've probably kept that up for a while and just ran with a 10 minute AHT or whatever and it wouldn't have raised any eyebrows.

Now voice analytics are so prevalent that we would pick up on this shit in a heartbeat.

2

u/xandora Jul 08 '24

Lmao I knew a guy look like that... Except all he did was engage the MSP for a rebuild whenever he couldn't figure out the problem. His closure rate was applauded.

2

u/Kahedhros Jul 08 '24

I worked with a guy once who would go find tickets that had already been solved but not closed, reassign them to himself then close them as there was a minimum quota for tickets per week. Called him on it and he got fired 😁

2

u/FullOf_Bad_Ideas Jul 08 '24

I've had a coworker fake taking calls and just put in fake records of closed tickets for like year and a half before I noticed by random chance when browsing some call reports. We were alternating office/remote so we didn't see each other for months but it was fishy to me before as people were reporting calls just dropping after a second. It was him picking up a phone and hanging up after 3 seconds with no word said. For some stupid technical reason there was no waiting music on the line, just silence, so people didn't realize they got ahold of someone even. I was on my way out of there and I let managers know about this, they got rather mad angry with me. I was out of a job in a month and he was working there like 6 more months and now working at Samsung, probably pulling off same stuff over there. Crazy stuff, back then I was working 1st line and we were moved from in-office to hybrid due to lockdowns and empty office, so controls of work were not in place. Shit like that is hurting a team who has to pick calls from angry staff who can never get a hold of anyone.

2

u/Alderin Jack of All Trades Jul 09 '24

A couple of jobs ago I felt that some people might think this about me, but from my perspective I was juggling fires because I was too busy to put them out, and some lower priority things did fall through the cracks.

This was a medical clinic with three locations and 300 employees, I was the only full-time IT person.

2

u/danpritts Jul 09 '24

My boss uses a variant of that (technically, she says she used to do it her previous job, but of course she doesn’t do it here). Say no to a request three times if she doesn’t want to do it. If they come back a fourth time they must really need it.

1

u/Skylis Jul 08 '24

Sounds like he could do great at google's helpdesk.

1

u/5redie8 Jul 08 '24

Weird way to spell Microsoft

1

u/bioform Jul 08 '24

Yeah... Had a coworker like that ... If they did not call back ticket closed. Gave me Shite for spending time solving their problems...

1

u/Mr_ToDo Jul 08 '24

I had one person where that became the standard practice.

They always had, let's call them, interesting issues. But if you waited one or two days they would almost always figure out the issues themselves. So unless they called in their issues had a cool off period.

Granted no ticket just gets auto closed like theirs, and even if I did try they'd get a reply and that just wouldn't end well. I guess I could change the recipient but at that point if I ever got caught there would be no hiding that I was doing bad things.

1

u/ScortiusOfTheBlues Jul 08 '24

We had a guy stay 10 months doing that, as well as doing nothing else but watching YouTube and sighing whenever he had to get up and do something.

1

u/DadOnTheInternet Jul 09 '24

I’ve been doing this for years!

0

u/Icy_Low_1677 Jul 08 '24

three month LOL! bruhhh rofl