I've seen this before.
I was working as a swing shift computer operator. I was second-senior in the department and we had a couple of new hires. One of them did a terrific job and was up and running without any issues. The other guy sadly didn't seem to care. I told him very nicely that he has to do something about his attitude otherwise he'd be canned. He kept coming in late, messing up the jobs, and even killed some data off of a sever once all because he didn't use his head. I even told him that I was saying this as a "friend" who cared, and he should see about doing better before the manager came down on him.
So after having our peer-to-peer talk, he went off and whined to the manager instead of taking what I said and work with it instead. A few weeks later he was canned. He never did learn a stinking bloody thing from our conversation.
Children will shoot you the bird and run away. This is exactly what he did.
