There are legitimately situations where a meritless person is mooching off of an organization because of corruption (e.g. cronyism, nepotism, abusing union). And then there are situations where a person appears completely incompetent, but has this one unique skill or asset that makes them absolutely invaluable to the company (e.g. savant, schmoozer, someone with connections). It's important to be able to tell them apart.
So many people in IT don't understand this. I'm glad I did a lot of customer service while programming was still just a hobby.
Developing the product or supporting the product dev team in some way (tech support, project managers, etc) is great, but if the company doesn't have people to schmooze other people to give them money, your product doesn't have much financial value.
No. Not in this day and age. The totality of human knowledge fits in your pocket and if you're too fucking stupid or lazy to figure out how to use that device to learn something that any 12-year-old can do, you instantly lose my respect. And if your name isn't on the building, or on the floor, if there isn't a picture of you in the foyer, then you also go to the bottom of my priority list.
I can’t speak for any individual, but let’s draw up a theoretical scenario:
You’re the world’s highest contributing cancer researcher, responsible for breakthrough after breakthrough. You’re 80 years old and you want to retire next year. You earn $1 million a year. in order to collaborate with other researchers, specialized piece of software must be used. Given you’re brilliant, you could certainly take a training course and learn it in eight hours - $4000 worth of your time. Instead you scan your paper notebooks and send the copies to an intern who spends an hour a week transferring the data into the software. If the intern is paid $50 an hour, cost savings are $1500 over the year. more cancer research gets done.
Highly specialized people who can learn everything and do have access to all necessary tools are not necessarily idiots for evaluating and deciding to make certain trade offs. recommend looking into opportunity cost.