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Idiots in good jobs


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28 minutes ago, Mudface said:

My brother had a similar experience. He joined the Marines straight from school, rose through the enlisted ranks pretty quickly, took a commission and reached either Lieutenant- or full-Colonel. He left disillusioned that that was as high as he could go compared to people who went straight in as officers, and that they had gone up the commissioned ranks faster than he had.

To be fair if he made full colonel he couldn’t really have got much higher! 

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2 minutes ago, Rico1304 said:

To be fair if he made full colonel he couldn’t really have got much higher! 

Sorry, it was actually Lieutenant-Colonel, just checked. It was more that he felt he had to continually do much better than others who'd gone straight in from Uni to get the same promotions.

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Guest Pistonbroke
5 minutes ago, Mudface said:

Sorry, it was actually Lieutenant-Colonel, just checked. It was more that he felt he had to continually do much better than others who'd gone straight in from Uni to get the same promotions.

 

Lieutenant- Colonel is a decent officers rank mate, most stagnate at Major. 

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Guest Pistonbroke
1 minute ago, Mudface said:

Well, he was certainly pretty bitter about it. Ironic really, as he's a bloo...

 

Not many make full Colonel mate, after that you are basically getting into the ranks saved for the elite, usually old bastards with a lot of knowledge/backing but fuck all use away from the war room, Brigadier and then the three general ranks. 

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1 hour ago, Mudface said:

Sorry, it was actually Lieutenant-Colonel, just checked. It was more that he felt he had to continually do much better than others who'd gone straight in from Uni to get the same promotions.

I went to Catterick once and had a night out with my mate who was RSM in the paras.  The colonel came out with us and was basically royalty. We were walking through the base and he stepped into the road to commandeer a bus to take us to a club. I fell asleep having a poo. 

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Used to work in a restaurant in Waterloo for some dodgy fucker who was a millionaire and owned loads of property. 

 

When I first started I thought I might be able to learn something from him and how he's made his money. After a while it dawned on me that he was stupid in basic business practices like stocktaking because all the staff were robbing him blind left right and centre. The restaurant manager had a scam going of hardly putting anything through the till and pocketing five times his wages a week. 

 

He was a tight cunt about everything but he never knew in monetary terms how much he was saving. 

 

The owner was a massive bullshit artist and people who came to his restaurant thought he was nice and charming at first. But he couldn't hold a proper conversation with anyone about anything. Some fella started talking to him about Formula One and managed to blag him that Jean Alesi the Italian Driver was from Birkenhead. Also used to lie to everyone that he was Italian even though he couldn't speak a word of it and had an Iranian name.

 

His property empire was impressive but it was like Homes under the hammer without doing them up or spending money on them. He admitted he had no idea about how the actual legal system and tenants rights worked, only that he would just ignore anyone if anything went wrong. 

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I have found in my life that the larger the organisation, the truer this becomes.

 

A small organisation won't let it happen, if the manager/owner is even halfway competent. It just becomes too obvious too quickly.

 

Whereas with a huge global multinational it is fairly easy for a reasonably competent "office politician" to play the blame game and schmooze their way up the food chain and it is harder to pinpoint that they're out of their depth. Particularly when the problem has gone on so long that the other people who should know that the person in question is incompetent are themselves idiots.

 

I work for a smallish global charity, it's brilliant. But I have worked in the past with some of the big boys and some of the pettiness and idiocy at the highest levels of some of them is beyond belief. Oh, and at a retail job for a giant American firm (back in uni) I worked with a woman who had somehow made her way into middle management despite being an almost psychopathically evil so-and-so whom everyone who ever met her despised within 5 minutes.

 

I mean, how does that even happen? How do you earn a promotion if absolutely everyone hates you? And yet she was being considered for yet another one at the time I left. Probably a vice president by now.

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My dad knew of a guy who became extremely highly placed in the federal government simply because he was a phenomenal interviewer.

 

One of the laziest people you'll ever meet apparently but he somehow managed to hypnotize and impress people wherever he went. 

 

I bet Hitler would have become CEO of Volkswagen or something if he was living in present times. 

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5 hours ago, 3 Stacks said:

My dad knew of a guy who became extremely highly placed in the federal government simply because he was a phenomenal interviewer.

 

One of the laziest people you'll ever meet apparently but he somehow managed to hypnotize and impress people wherever he went. 

 

I bet Hitler would have become CEO of Volkswagen or something if he was living in present times. 

I thought Hitler was?

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On 25/06/2019 at 21:56, Shooter in the Motor said:

This is probably the least surprising post I have ever read on this forum.

Yeah I’m an accountant so I have payroll info etc. Tell you what, if I could do a a career change, I’d be an IT Project Manager. Doesn’t seem to be that difficult a job, but very lucrative.

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10 hours ago, 3 Stacks said:

My dad knew of a guy who became extremely highly placed in the federal government simply because he was a phenomenal interviewer.

 

One of the laziest people you'll ever meet apparently but he somehow managed to hypnotize and impress people wherever he went. 

 

I bet Hitler would have become CEO of Volkswagen or something if he was living in present times. 

Worked with a guy who spent more time making sure he put down everything even vaguely positive ( letting on to the cleaners , making the tea etc. ) on a spreadsheet than doing his actual job. He shot up the ladder by basically being the king of competency-based interviews.

 

I always wondered what would have happened if any interviewer had studied his previous interview notes and asked if he had ever achieved any of the targets he so confidently suggested he would.

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11 hours ago, 3 Stacks said:

My dad knew of a guy who became extremely highly placed in the federal government simply because he was a phenomenal interviewer.

 

One of the laziest people you'll ever meet apparently but he somehow managed to hypnotize and impress people wherever he went. 

 

I bet Hitler would have become CEO of Volkswagen or something if he was living in present times. 

 

5 hours ago, VladimirIlyich said:

I thought Hitler was?

Hitler created Volkswagen. 'People's Car"

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Guest Pistonbroke

I'm not sure it would be classed as a good job, although it is well paid over here in Germany, but I know this woman who has serious mental problems with depression and she's just passed her train drivers licence. She's also an idiot. 

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On 25/06/2019 at 16:12, Mudface said:

I work in IT- my last manager but one was a former chef, who treated our calendars like they were Tetris, shoving work in here, there and everywhere without any thought as to whether the dates fitted the projects. He got shoved to one side when he couldn't account for a missing £100K one month to his manager, thank fuck.

 

My current manager is an utter moron. She's barely literate and doesn't know anything about IT, or even managing projects, I have absolutely no idea how she got where she is- our departmental director actually asked her if she'd ever done a project plan before, she's that clueless. Fortunately, she's also a lazy bitch and a coward so rarely gets involved in stuff we do- when she does though, she just causes chaos as she's completely useless.

Moss, is that you?

 

Image result for it crowd jen

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I worked with a senior manager who was put in charge of accounts payable. He admitted himself that he didnt know how it worked, but he also said he didnt have to, being a Professor Of Business was enough. It wasnt.

 

He was good at letting you know what colour postits to match with what topics on the whiteboard though.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Is there a bigger example of this than academia? Quite a few of our lecturers were drunken wrecks who'd worked in industry briefly and then found a cushy number teaching. Most of them are still there and still have a shit rep. It's amazing. 

 

When you go through a few lecturers' backgrounds on linkedin it's pretty mindblowing. You'd expect them  to have done some pretty impressive stuff but quite often they haven't. 

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