He claims no one is bad and some just don't fit and will thrive elsewhere, but this is nonsense to anyone with big corporation experience. I've met many people who never did any work, only jumped to the next easiest excuse for why they turned nothing in, and just got their pay check because it was too much of a pain to fire them.
In my personal experience, large corporations are particularly demotivating to almost everyone, so it's not a surprise that there are a lot of so-called B, C, or even D players there.
I've met some like that in certain environments, but I wonder if it isn't a part of an unholy match between their priorities and the employer priorities.
That is, a place I saw this commonly was a government defense contractor. One of the guys there joined because he figured, eh, government, job security. Huge projects, very little accountability. The whole system is set up for failure; the profitable projects are still failures, and any project that overdelivers cost the company money, because that benefit is legally prevented from being used in their favor when bidding on future contracts.
It's in the company's interest to keep a stable of employees who produce at a -predictable- pace, who are complacent and don't excel (so raises can be predictable and there won't be employee initiated turnover). And that was what this person was looking for.
What happens if this person suddenly has to start being competitive? What happens if people start relying on him for more? I don't know. You don't know. These people themselves probably don't know. I can't use those examples to disqualify the OP, even though I too am very familiar with them.
Exactly. I had a co-worker once, who was a JavaScript programmer — with zero knowledge of JavaScript. Could not tell function call from variable definition, and wasn't willing to learn, because why do that.
The scary part: he worked there for 2-3 years. Doing absolutely nothing. Like that dude from Dilbert, only in real life.
I learned an excellent lesson in management from this, got in serious shit for trying to get a guy like that fired.
Give them glowing reviews and a transfer somewhere else, in the same way that a null can be cast to any class, someone who can do nothing can work in any field.
I think big corporates are a perfect example. Have you ever poured your heart and soul into a project only to have it canned for political reasons? Ever worked in a job that could be automated or done by half as many people but doing so would reduce a managers/directors/departments power? Ever wanted to switch to working on important projects where you can make a difference only to have your manager refuse your transfer because it would make his/her job harder?
This sort of stuff is common in big corporates and a natural response is to do the bare minimum.
The way I see the metaphor used, A players are 10x as productive as B players.
The group you describe seem to be actively trying to get nothing done, which would put them in an different category (C players? F(ailure) players? I(ncompetent) players?).
