Some interactions with an employee have left a bad taste in my mouth.
Warning: Spoiler! (Click to show)I suspect he either thinks the work is beneath him or that he doesn't like the idea of taking orders from me, or both (I'm only a year older than him, but I am in a position to be giving orders...and he was assigned to me to do this by someone at the top).
It is not the most exciting of tasks, but it is certainly far from the shittiest of tasks (and I have had some analysts running for 2 weeks straight on some pretty damn shitty tasks). It isn't mindless work, but it is fairly routine--the goal was to get it off my plate so I could focus on other things, and we thought that he was pretty competent and that by working on my stuff, he would get up to speed on this project and we could use him for other tasks (hard to work on most of this stuff without knowing the background information, and this should be a good introduction to it)
He's done this work a couple of times now (and the work product was acceptable) and I got some additional data so I asked him to check over it like before and stressed the importance of it since some big decisions are being made on a very rapid timetable. He said he would be fine to do it over the weekend. At 8PM on sunday, I get a single sentence response and with a list of things that "might be worth reviewing"...from the larger list of things I sent him to review.
I respond, basically saying that that isn't what I asked for (I certainly don't want to review these things...I could have generated that same list in 10 minutes) and that what I need is for him to review those items and tell me which ones have certain problems. I try to reiterate what we are looking for in case he had forgotten and try to further explain some things he could look for when reviewing these items.
I get back a snarky run-on paragraph trying to explain why he gave me what he gave me that ends with "if you just want [exactly what I asked for] then the only items that need to be explictly reviewed are items X and Y". So I figure I do have to go through the list myself...an hour and a half later, I have determined that the two items he mentioned are actually perfectly fine and don't have any of the issues I had him looking for. However, almost everything else on the fucking list has the problems!
What annoys me is that we've talked about promoting him. I didn't have much to say because while I knew him, I had never really worked with him. But the other people who were there (who are all more senior, and perhaps more importantly, were all in their current positions when he started at the company while I was in the same position as him when he started) all said he did good work and specifically mentioned that he was always taking the next step and was asking the right questions and looking into strange results before being explicitly told. Then he does some work for me and it is shit with no follow-through whatsoever. I suspect he just thinks that my stuff isn't important (because I'm not important) and that he'd rather be working on other projects that sound better to him. What he doesn't realize is that my stuff is probably the best stuff for his career since it keeps him working with the team that is trying to promote him...and now I am disinclined to want to have him continue working on this project (though he may still get promoted since decisions might have already been made and announcements come out at the end of the month).
