Yeah...just enough to make it exciting. Haha... (another PE...)

No, I'm saying the deadheads Dilbert poked fun at in the business world would likely be the ones who would vote for Obama twice.
I met some when I was a security guard at a Wachovia data center.
Two dim Dems in particular really could not stand it when I watched Fox News when I ate a meal in the break room.
I remember one hovering over my back while I sat and ate while wearing a holstered .38.
Guess the weapon may be why he finally left without even saying anything.
Heck, I was eating in there by myself. My wannabe intimidator just came in for a Coke or something.

Why? The government expropriates part of our earnings in order, supposedly, to provide services (and sometimes products). If someone is affluent and pays a lot in taxes, why shouldn't that person receive back what the government claims it can do better than private individuals, being health care or subsidized housing? Or has the government actually admitted that it takes not because it can supposedly do better, but because that it steals outright and the politicians simply buy votes with the loot? Perhaps it should admit it.

Are you saying the stuff Dilbert poked fun at in the 90s has found its way to the POTUS?

Yes, but so many reasonably affluent people wanting a little bit of a handout is a concern for me.

I have had a number of careers, one of which was as a publisher. You are right about writers. We did graphic biographies which entailed research and good writing. In our business finding a good writer was akin to panning for gold. When you got one, you did your best to hold on. We were noted for giving unknowns their first opportunity after submitting samples of their work. About 1 in 50 were passable. Maybe 1 in a thousand could be termed good. Not because of creativity, but because in most cases there were so many errors in spelling, phrasing, grammar, and just plain sentences that made sense, that it would take more time correcting than it was worth. Plus we were always on a deadline. In all the years we were in business, we hired only one writer based on his original submission. We published his submission and then loaded him up with as much work as he could handle. He's still writing to this day, and to this day, I don't know if that first submission was intentional or a lark. But it made a career for him.

I worked in the tech industry since 1991. Since 1998 its been running teams to running departments in the services side of software businesses.

I have seen two trends
1) a much larger percentage of job applicants have college degrees. About 1/3 (and usually the best ones) were self taught.
2) The percentage of those with College degrees that worked in the field prior to completing the degree had declines from about half to none over this time period.
3) People with the degree before they get any experience often cannot seem to think through a problem and come up with a solution. There are some exceptions.

This has made it so a major element of what I look for on a resume is did the person have experience in the field prior to getting a degree?

How does this relate to your question.

I not only find that many are full of excuses but find the cause if it is getting the education solely from the school and not from work experience.

Those that learned in school that the result is the code is done, not that the code works and works correctly.

Meanwhile those with job experience as part of the education process learned that a badly written chunk of code does not mean job done, just because the code is written.

To put it into school terms. A paper is done regardless of if you get a D or a C+ or A. It should be you did D work, do it again, repeat until its c+ work or do not pass the class. Perhaps B+ work, or even A required on key projects, papers or even a class. This would teach get it done right rather than get it done to pass.

I believe this to be a major factor on the source of the lazy work I see very often from people.

I don't know. I don't know the statistics on it, how
much of it is true, or how much just your subjective
opinion. I have tried to do my jobs properly. (When
I was18, I was fired from a maid's job because I was no good at it and was too slow, although I tried. I was on it 2 days. I was dreadfully a-
shamed. I never blamed the man for firing me.
I think I probably would have done the same).
But after that experience, I did not want to be
too slow on a job. The next job I got (carhop), I
worked to be very fast on it, and this was noted
very much. I worked very hard, often volunteer-
ing to do extra time. Once I went 90 days (at
least) with no days off. I loved that job, until it
was ruined for me by the manager's repeatedly
telling me to slow down. I gave a week's notice,
and when it was done, stayed around another 7
days, on a day-to-day basis, and then the other
manager said he had somebody, and then I left.
I was on that job about a year and a half,and
about 4 days later got a job in the furniture fac-
tory.
I noticed something about that carhop's job.
The cashiers didn't want to make change as
they were supposed to. I was given $10 to make
change with, at the beginning of the shift, which
$10 I was supposed to turn in at the end of the
shift, and any other money I had (being tips) I was supposed to keep.

The cashiers didn't want to accept a lot of
change when I paid for the order; they wanted
paper money. The customers wanted to stick me with chicken s%1t out on the Curb; if the
order was $1.25, for instance, they would want
to pay me with a five or a ten, and instead of
letting me get rid of the change,, like normal,
decent people, they would want to pay me the
quarter overtop of the five, and get an extra
paper dollar, and leave me with another dollar in
chicken s%1t, which the cashiers would not
want to accept from me at the window when I
paid for the next order. So I would get more and
more chicken s%1t, and less and less paper.
The boss told me not to give them a lot of change when they were busy. An old cashier,
long in the place, said any time they had an
order, "That's busy." However, they were ex-
tremely uncooperative about changing into
paper during slack periods, between orders. And
then the Boss-man had the utter chutzpah to
mouth off to me about turning in a lot of change
at the end of the night when I turned in the $10,
for him to count. I told him once, (but this was
some time after I quit, when I was hanging a-
round the place; he mentioned it) "You de-
served to have to count it, for making me car-
ry it all night! I wish now I had taken it
into the kitchen and heated it up on the grill and
made you count it while it was hot! I wish I
could have melted it in a cauldron and poured it
molten down your throat!" He seemed some-
what taken aback, although somewhat amused,
but when I told him he was the one who didn't
make the cashiers turn it into paper during the
shift, he didn't really seem to have much to say.
---However, some years ago, an old co-worker
buddy of mine told me that that boss had sold
his share in the place to his brother-in-law (who
had been the other manager). And since that
time, the counter has been broken open; the
carhops go from the Curbhouse into the Inside,
and go to the cash register, and use it them-
selves.

I can't claim that these remarks are super-re-
levant; but sometimes people seem not to be
competent on their jobs, when the real cause
may lie in the incompetence or careless of man-
agement.

One of my favorite movies.

My wife recently gave me a Camacho for 2016 campaign tee shirt. I wear it all the time...

yes, and that "this way for years" attitude applies to
the incompetent actions, not the competent!!! -- j
.

from his gulch intros, Abaco is:::
“I am a man of math and science, a pilot, engineer, father, and sportfisherman. Oh ... and a geek.” plus:::
he used to fly aerobatics – does engineering by day; finance by night

he's involved with lotsa incompetence. -- j
.

I'm not entirely sure about that. I enjoy watching "Idiocracy" with Luke Wilson, and sometimes I feel that we're almost there. Then again, it might be that people who give a stupid impression, often do it in public.

The degradation starts in the kindergarten, when every child is told that he is special, wonderful and perfect. Each is the best that could be. There could be nothing better. So, there is no need to be better; no need to try, no need to exert oneself. Then, when they get a little older, they observe the society's heroes - usually either passive victims (like 9/11) or losers, while the ones that should be heroes, because they took heroic actions, are villified.

In high school, the kids spend school time on projects to "help" losers, further instilling the notion that it pays being a loser. Then they graduate illiterate and with no useful skills, but the college gives them a couple of years of remedial arithmetic. And after a happy childhood like that (lasting at least until they're 26), what do you expect of them?

Yes.

I think you are headed in a valid direction on this. Kids are different. The Left's response is to just give them free stuff. The Right's response is to say that they need a spanking or that this is a result of them being given everything. I have been involved, firsthand, in research that clearly showed that kids today, en masse, are loaded with neurotoxins. Were they as loaded 50 years ago? We don't know. I know that they are now.

This is why when I first coached a youth soccer team several years ago (it was about five years after I first saw the data) and I saw how much trouble the boys were having paying attention to any input we had for them...I'll be honest, I was almost driven to tears. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. At the same time, I was pretty sure I had seen the smoking gun. Very troubling for this Objectivist...

I educate my own kids. I work about 65 hours/week, too, to pay for the collapsed system.

Sometimes I think there is just so much intelligence to go around. Maybe intelligence drops as the numbers increase. Or, as the population grows, and the distribution of IQ remains Gaussian, there are many more folks with scores to the left of 100.

You've found the result of discussions emanating from the Univ. of Chicago faculty rooms and other institutions supposedly at the fore-front of our nations' education practices.

Several years ago, our public school system---which indoctrinates 80~90% of our nations kids---stopped teaching writing. The theory being, if one pushes kids to read and read a lot that grammar and writing skills will be picked up through osmosis.

I.e., good luck getting a writer.

I have had to buy grammar books (among other subjects) for my own kids.. and am constantly wondering why the heck I even let them go to public schools nowadays. We spend a good deal of time at home going through extra work.

The public school system is dwindling fast, irregardless of Common Core infiltration. The Department of Education must be closed, quickly. State and Federal levels. Our kids are not taught to think at all now.

"You can never underestimate the stupidity of the general public." -- Scott Adams

The answer is to shop places or businesses that have a superior product. You cannot discount service and quality for a price. Too often businesses like yours go for the lowest price. Go with quality people and reap the rewards.

I have a possible contributing factor to the "dumbing" down of the world. I don't know if there is anyone here who is old enough to remember when they used to add Tetraethyllead to gasoline (ie. Leaded gasoline). This has released enough lead into the global enviroment that there has to be a certain level of neurotoxicity to every person. While I cannot show a causal link to the decrease in intelligence linked to this increase in lead poisoning (there are too many variables caused by different groups that also have caused our educational system to decline), I think it has at least a minor contribution to it.

The whole "twenty something" crawl their way up thing? Some of them I work with are doing exactly this. Others have to be spoon fed exactly how to do everything or it won't be done correctly. I don't know if they don't care to take pride in their work or if their supervisor has played dumb enough that they think they can get away with it too. They know people will give up on training because it's easier to do it themselves and know it is correct instead of training and retraining what should have been learned in school.

I've heard them called out for sloppy work but it keeps happening again and again. We try to put measures in place but they won't use them. It's more work.

The title is perfect. Zombies. And, worst of all, the people who care are turning into them because they're burning out from the abuse. Yep. Who is John Galt?

Hello Abaco,
Yes. I see it all the time. My company must constantly work to make our tools "fool proof." Forty years of improving tools and trying to do so and try as I might, I have never been able to keep pace with their ability to be foolish. It seems impossible for one with competence to imagine the levels of incompetence possible. The companies that I supply move people with a modicum of ability and intelligence into supervisory positions and struggle to fill the openings with anyone competent.
Yes, jbrenner is right; who is John Galt?
Respectfully,
O.A.

Anybody ever see the remake of that movie "The Crazies"? Sometimes it reminds me of the early part of that movie and I chuckle...

Interesting, CircuitGuy. Perhaps a glimmer of hope.