[t0mmel]

I can’t help wonder “where are the colleagues?”

It’s not that I expect someone to try and salvage a situation where someone is coding in Word - but is there more to the story when you say this went on for months ? I don’t think I have ever been in an environment where that would ha e been allowed to continue for that long... ? Sounds like an environment scared of dealing with things ?

[ibejoeb]

Could've been and overactive HR situation. Sometimes it's clear that it needs to end, but despite that clarity, the organisation dictates that there be PIP, which then kicks off a documentation period, and so on, which can in fact take months.

[bane]

Pretty close. It was a perfect storm of her being a subcontractor, buried under a hierarchy of a mix of incompetent subcontractors and incompetent employees who also happened to be fairly senior. In the mix was also a dose of HR sensitive health issues, and subcontractor politics.

In other words it was a mess. And it took a lot of firings to get rid of all of them once the tower of failure was discovered by a new outside hire department head. There appeared to be a something an effect of the incompetent senior person surrounding himself with incompetents who then hired incompetents and turtles all the way down.

It was almost comical that we ended up with such a group of terrible technical staff in this area, but "types code in MS-Word" was definitely the low point and is now a bit of a company legend.