Was mulling over my career history today as I start looking for a new contract.
One of the reasons I like contracting is I can just focus on getting the job done and (largely) detach my from politics…

I work in Marketing (which may be part of the problem!) but over the years I seem to have worked with more than my fair share of blaggers and people who simply aren’t that good at their jobs…

Anyone else think the competent are in a (tiny) minority…

49.9% are below average.

Currently
100% (I’m self employed)
Previously it’s ranged from 25-60% I reckon

Leaving for airport in 1hr – still waiting for tickets.

Says it all really!

I’m not. Some of my colleagues are though. Fortunately I’m leaving not only the company but the country.

Over the years Ive been lucky to work in teams of very capable people. Its the corporate management that have spoilt the party. So now as a freelancer I get to just hang out with the shiny people.

I’ve never considered the words work and competent together before.

Interesting idea, but it’s not for me!

99% are competent. I’m the 1%er.

The problem in my line of work is that been ‘good at your job’ isn’t really what others want you to be, consequently people who get on are really ‘good in the job’…

The current beef/horse crisis is a good example. But I’ve been involved in others. Nobody thanks you for spotting the flaws in their work/process/contract.

And, Auditing.

yeah, I’d agree there are trades where blaggers can get away with more.

I work in IT.
If I look at the operations side, I’d say 90%, probably higher, are competent. You can only make a couple of mistakes in that game before you get pulled up. In fact, all it really needs is one big one and that’s it.

Design, probably less but not much. 60-70% are competent. It probably takes longer for mistakes to be identified and traced back so more time to build up a smokescreen.

Architecture. That’s easy. Them guys talk bobbins most of the day, I’d question how much they actually output and there is limited repercussions for getting things wrong. After all, they can blame designers and ops for any problems. 30-40% As long as you can drive a beemer and use buzz words, you’re mostly sorted.

At my level, senior management. Probably single figures really know what they’re doing. I question my own competence daily.

We carried out a similar survey at work. 100% of staff felt that everyone else was less competent than themselves. (You’d get much the same result asking the same question of drivers too).

trail_rat – Member
Leaving for airport hiding under the stairs in 1hr – Says it all really!

😉

just when you feel competant is the time to start asking yourself if you really are

in office today – 14
competent – im counting 6 (one of those is two halves)

if you want that as a percentage, it totally depends who i ask to do it.

In nearly 20years of sound engineering I can only think of one other bloke I would trust to do my work….and he ride mountain bike as well 🙂

About 50%.
I handover to two blaggers every working day.
Used to wind me up , but doesn’t seem to bother our superiors, so i now
cruise along also.

The management here actually have me convinced that the place must be a live experiment to prove the Peter Principle.

colleagues 85%
managers 25%
senior managers 0%

Competent – I reckon many / most are ‘competent’ but that to me says average or even mediocre.

If you asked me who is good, or brilliant – a far smaller proportion.

Unfortunately working for a big, process orientated organisation as i do currently – everything is so structured and siloed that it actually rewards people who are good at doing just their bit and then handing off to the next silo. People who can do far more than that are getting gradually ground down into either corporate clones, or moving on to organisations with more freedom. Either way the average quotient of talent per person is going lower and lower, so when something happens that doesn’t have a process then default position is to have a massive meeting to design a process to deal with it, instead of 2 or 3 smart people getting together and thrashing out a solution.

For that reason – hopefully, in a week or two’s time – I’m oot.

My immediate reaction is to say 0% and bearing in mind my company only has one employee (me) then maybe I need to believe in myself more!

Luckily, it seems my clients do. And peers in the industry.

Maybe it is something to do with realising that there are orders of magnitude more things I still need to learn than I have already learned. Whatever it is, it seems some people just assume they know everything when they *clearly* do not…

Rachel

So everyone on STW is competent (except myself and DezB) and your colleagues / managers are not?

Interesting.

Judging from the personality types that the forum attracts, I was expecting lots to give low percentages for answers. It’s the beginnings of a certain condition isn’t it? When you start to look around and think that the only person doing it properly is yourself.

You look around think everyone else isn’t working so I’ll just post it on an internet forum not in the least related to the work I’m (supposed to be) doing?

Pretty funny really. I can hold my hands up and say I’m useless and lazy.

With the industry I work in, during most of my career the competence of people has been the least of my worries. Its not being on the receiving end of their delusional, coke-addled, ego-crazed, sociopathic tendencies that’s the main concern.

I’m very lucky to work with the most professional, and low temperature team I’ve ever worked with at the moment. I however, am an idiot!

In my current place of work, in IT (where I am), I’d say a very large proportion are. Constant reviews etc seem to weed out the hangers on pretty efficiently. Not a massive company though so nowhere to hide if you’re rubbish.

Two previous jobs have been at large banks. One particular was horrific (one of the many reasons I left). Out the team I worked in there, I’d say maybe 2 or 3 out of 10 would survive where I am now but being such a massive organisation which such blurred boundaries and absolutely rubbish managers in that team, they were safe. Too many old skool people who weren’t up to speed with current technologies but had been there too long to pay off cheaply. So they sat occupying reasonably good roles whilst counting down to retirement…

Most of my direct contacts within the company are techies. Although generally quite competent, they’re so stuck in their ways that there is little or no interest in learning new skills/technology/platforms or mimicking/bettering what our competitors offer. Truly boils my pi55.

EDIT: I work a lot with the public sector – from clinical app support bods through to various Directors. The former are scary because they often have no basic IT skills yet they support 1000s of staff! E.g. one IT Training Manager said to me 3-4 years ago, “Oh, I need to install that program do I? Ok, I’ll download it to the RAM then.”

When you start to look around and think that the only person doing it properly is yourself.

I must be overly competent at my job as I only put in 40% effort and still have it done to more than required levels. 🙂