Question: How to deal with an employee (in this case a db developer/admin) who can never admit that he may have done something wrong.
Scenario: Yesterday, our test web server suddenly would no longer authenticate our test users. We went through the usual things to check and then checked more. Everything looked ok on the web server and on the database server.
During the whole time, he kept going on about how everything is ok and there “shouldn’t be a problem.” But there was!
Finally, this guy admitted that he had installed a MS security patch and rebooted the test server at about the same time that the trouble started. (Why did it take him two hours to mention that?) I checked the event logs and found that some of the services did not restart properly when the server came back up. After restarting the services, everything returned to normal.
I tried to explain to him that he needs to check the event logs after a reboot, but he insisted that the services were running because Enterprise Manager (for whatever reason) showed them as running.
Of course, he took no responsibility and blamed the problem on the patch, on EM or anyone else. His entire approach during the whole time of the troubleshooting was negative. This exemlifies his personality – or at least the way he comes off.
Note: He’s from eastern Europe and perhaps this could be part of the way he was raised or his native culture. In any case, it’s not the way we work and it’s not productive.
I’m his manager and I don’t appreciate his approach. Oddly enough, nobody else seems to mind.
Any thoughts?