New writers and thoughts about them

For nearly three weeks, I have been training two new writers who have joined our team. Both are contractors. One is a young man. The other is an older woman.

It's like night and day with these two. The young man is curious and learns quickly. I see him fitting in well and doing a great job in his role.

The older woman has issues. The first is comprehension. I will mention specific details in an e-mail and she will miss reading them. Something as simple as our manager saying to not come into the office did not register at all in her mind.

I had this brief text chat yesterday, for instance:

I noticed going through her work that involved reading a report that she doesn't pay attention to details. She asked me whether we had an answer when we barely read through it. It makes more sense to me that she does not read carefully -- that she jumps from section to section -- almost as if she's in a rush or is impatient.

She didn't read this exercise carefully. I've noticed this issue with the previous three.

Her third exercise was interesting. She missed step 5. She managed to change step 9 when it wasn't called for. She didn't bother doing steps 10 and 11. Yet, she said that she was done and that her output was the same as her male peer in our training session.

Um, no.

I remember asking her, rather politely, why certain steps were omitted or missed. Typically, when you are following a procedure, you do each step sequentially. I asked if there were too many concepts presented to her. She said maybe. Hmm.

I have concerns about her. I don't think that she'll do well because she can't grasp simple concepts expressed in exercises or messages. She jumps all over the place when reading text and almost seems like she can't focus.

It's weird.

I have both new writers on my team. I get to continue to work with them, which is a breath of fresh air with the young man. However, it requires more effort on my part to work with the older woman and her omitting key details in whatever she is working on.

It's be interesting.

More aggravation with the incompetent colleague

The incompetent colleague continues to prove that she is not the brightest tool in the shed. I had had it with her on Monday.

On Friday, she asked a manager for information. He responded that same day. She asked the same question first thing on Monday morning, which made him respond by saying that she didn't need to ask so soon. Before all of that, I had indicated the same thing to her.

She cannot think for herself. She can't assess any situation. She just sees a task on a checklist and does it. Ugh!

What annoyed me even more was that she proceeded to ask the same manager for a different set of information. I had explained that I had all this information for the last two team meetings. It means that our entire team has all that information. She doesn't pay attention. She continues to show everyone that she cannot comprehend simple things.

And, she constantly talks without listening. I had a short fuse on Monday and told her to stop it.

She is to be let go. The problem is working at a company that has tons of procedural nonsense that needs to be done beforehand. It's at my manager's manager level. It likely means that it will take another month before she leaves the company.

I am surprised that I am not committed at a mental institution by now.

She also is indifferent when it comes to emotions. I've never met anyone like that. There is no compassion there, which is odd to me.

Incompetent colleague is on her way out

The incompetent colleague who has been with us for three months is on her way out the door.

My manager had a private meeting with me last Thursday. He has decided to let her go.

On the one hand, I am relieved for both my students and I who have been trying to help her learn. The problem is that she has issues with comprehension. None of us can help her there.

Everything needs to be written down for her to memorize the details. Explaining details seems to go in one ear and out the other.

Last Thursday, our manager asked her what an acronym stood for and what it meant in our team meeting. As expected, she nailed the former. She got the latter wrong. She has been doing this task since she first started. The question wasn't complex at all.

On a good note, I have another colleague who has joined our team. One of my students and I will be training her on Monday. None of them know that this incompetent colleague is heading out the door.

That's where the other hand comes in. She has a childlike mentality. She's a decent person and I feel sad that she will be losing her job. However, she is a burden to our entire team. We have all been pitching in to help her and the exercise has been futile.

I don't know when her final day will be. My guess is that it'll be at the end of this month.

Issues with the new employee continue

I haven't talked about the new employee for a bit. She is definitely the most challenging person to understand. This post explores a lot of my thoughts that I have shared with various folks for the past month.

We have a new authoring tool that most of our team has been gearing up to move to. I have said to this person that she is not ready. She doesn't have the basics down with our current authoring tool. My team consisting of this woman and two students are staying on our current tool.

She is stubborn and adamant to learn the new tool. Her reasoning, according to what she told my two students, is that there isn't a relationship between the two authoring tools. Um, that's because you don't understand the existing tool well enough to see that your transition to the new one will be difficult if you don't have a decent foundation on how things work.

Before the Christmas holidays, I had instructions for my two students to look at the training materials on the new tool. I specifically told the new employee that she wasn't ready and to focus on learning our current tool. What does she do? She watched one of the videos on the new tool.

She has raised a number of red flags in my eyes. The first one occurred during her third interview (it was my second one with her) where she said that she was a "slow learner." I brought that up to my manager, but he dismissed it. He thought that the extra time she spends after work to learn would make her catch up.

I was right. Hiring a slow learning in an IT field is bad.

She has been with the company for over two months. She cannot grasp simple things like knowing that the entire team is away on an all-employee meeting, which means that the team will not respond to her e-mails. She couldn't attend because she had a medical appointment that day and worked from home. Yet, she constantly sent out e-mails and even texted one of my students over work when she got to this offsite meeting that was not urgent. She does not take into consideration whether folks are physically able to respond to her e-mails. She is only thinking about herself.

Most of our department has to do a test that grants you access to this new tool, but for the production (live) environment. I said to this new employee that her main focus is to get up to speed with work so that she takes over one of my documentation software release duties. Her deadline is later than everyone else's to do this test. My manager made the same comment in a departmental meeting last Thursday.

What does she do? The following day, she takes this test. She hasn't gone through all the training materials or videos. She just did the test over and over again (you select either one answer or some combination) until she passed it.

I was annoyed. I told her so on Monday. The fact that she just asked for access to the test environment and was absolutely afraid to even log on was a joke. Now, she has access to a production environment where she could mess up everything with her current "knowledge" that she allegedly proved to possess on this test.

I told her she put the cart before the horse.. How meaningful are the answers that she memorized to ultimately pass this test? Not all that meaningful at this stage.

She doesn't listen. She has difficulty comprehending simple concepts. Yet, she does whatever she feels like.

She pointed out that she's not a linear learner. Yep, it shows. She is all over the map to the point where none of us truly knows what she is thinking. She has no sound judgment about much.

I had a talk with my manager on Monday night. I told him that my students and I have been drilling her with exercises and explaining concepts in multiple different ways. It is the plan that he first devised. It doesn't appear to be helping. I levelled with him and said that she wasn't a fit for this job. He nodded.

The problem is that the company is under a hiring freeze. We let her go and I am back to doing everything. I personally don't want her becoming a permanent employee at this company. She is not pulling her weight. I don't always want to be saving the day because we can't get another employee to fill the void.

On Tuesday, my manager wrote an e-mail to her and copied me. It was a snowday. He basically reinforced that she needs to work on understanding concepts and her job. All of us have noticed that she is great at memorizing, but does not understand what she is spewing out. She doesn't have critical thinking skills. She can't think for herself.

I had this chat with my guy when we were in the States. He agrees that it's probably better to get rid of her than having her pull down everyone.

The current plan is to have my students work with her on simulating a documentation release. We are assessing how she will do within the next two weeks. I have a feeling that she will be at the level that she is currently at -- slow and incompetent.

She's a nice person. She's just not suitable for this job.

Thoughts about how a newbie learns

It has been nearly two weeks that my students and I have been training the new employee. It has been a challenge for all of us.

I am still trying to figure out how this new employee learns. It's difficult to narrow down, but here are my notes:

• She is an extremely slow learner. She requires tons of repetition doing the same task before she begins to understand it.
• She is not good at recognizing patterns. If there is a clear example on the page, she does not know how to apply that example to solve her current problem.
• She does not read well. It doesn't matter whether she has a checklist or a procedure on how to do a task, she does not read details carefully. She also does not read e-mails well.
• Her comprehension is dismal. She constantly relies on my PowerPoint slides and treats them as the gospel. When she has a checklist to go through, she is still dependent on her slides and doesn't realize that the checklist takes precedence. When I quiz her on how to do something, she goes to her printed slide notes and doesn't get it. So, it's another explanation, but from a different angle. 
• She says thanks too often. Sure, we are all Canadian. However, saying thanks after every other sentence that we say does not register knowledge that we have passed on to her. It is also overkill.
• She is afraid to try anything on her own. When she had a question on how to edit a page the other day, I asked her to give it a try. She gave me a firm, "No!" Um, okay. Odd.

She does have a cartoon character voice. It's squeaky. One of my colleagues called it cute. I find it annoying the more she talks, which is pretty often.

My manager was impressed by how much information and research she did for her second interview. I didn't feel the same way. I realize now that it was all memorization. The comprehension is nonexistent. 

The red flag that I had during her second interview was that she admitted that she was a slow learner. I pointed that out to my boss. He said that the extra work that she does after hours will get her learning faster. I didn't think that it was the case then. I certainly don't see it now.

It is still frustrating dealing with someone who does not get what she is doing. I have even seen my students get frustrated.

Here's hoping that things get better, although things look bleak right now.

Exhausting week and questioning comprehension

What a long week! I'm exhausted.

I wrapped up a major release and pushed out a minor one. I got my little team consisting of two students and me to train a new employee on our team. It's good that she has been hired to take over some of my development tasks. However, I am still unsure about how I feel about her.

The way that she learns and comprehends puzzles me. She talks a lot. Information relayed to her doesn't register in her head.

She had a question about a feature and what the difference was between the options. I asked if she wanted to try one of the options out. She said with authority, "No!" That's not a good sign if you are all questions, you can retain answers, and you are hesitant to explore.

Yes, she talks a ton. It's to the point where I have to tune out. She also sounds like a little girl and she's nearly thirty years old. It's difficult to listen to her.

I am hoping that next week will fly by. I'm simply glad that the weekend is here.