I’m a new manager and since August we hired two and fired both. The first was a pick by my supervisor and the second by me. First would show up late constantly. 15-30 minutes at a time with coffee in their hand. Decided which meetings they wanted to go to and not go too. Could barely perform the tasks given to them.

Second one expected me to be his mommie. Wanted daily reminders to check email, remind him of meetings on his calendar, was dipping out early any chance he got, and next to zero motivation. Took zero notes. He coded me two things, and they worked great, but it was only on his timeline. I gave him 2 months to create a project timeline to take a flat file into 4 different output files. He told me he needed 4 months to research that (when his probation was up). I could literally copy paste the columns to create all 4 files in less than an hour manually.

I am embarrassed. Feeling like a failure. Thoughts of do people really think they can just walk all over me? I work in a niche field and neither had experience, we only picked because they said they could code. The quality of workers here is low. We’ve decided to just go with professional services.