All professions nurture their specific type of idiots; IT is no exception.

The particularly variegated diversity of idiots we meet in our professional life makes me wonder, every given time, if there could possibly be a limit to asininity. And every time I discover that no, there is none.

I always have been comforted by the fact that crackpots operate in fairly limited latitudes: once a project is successfully executed they are relegated to being another anecdotal matter, you go along and are ready to meet other fools on the next assignment: BaU for the sake of God.

Up until the day I discovered an especially crafted class of nuisance: the “Elliptical Idiot”.

Elliptical Idiots  won their name from a cosmological comparison I make: they orbit the vicinity of  my professional gravitational well, just like comets do with the our beloved Sun. Because comets fly over strongly eccentric paths, they are set to periodically come in proximity of their barycentre which (from my Heliocentric perspective) falls in to my intimate professional sphere.

We all know the belief: comets bring adversity and distress. If this is true, idiots are no less effective than their cosmic counterparts.

I suppose the reason why one might be confronted with Elliptical Idiots is because they are pretty good at selling themselves but rather bad in delivering their promises.

They show typical professional patterns: medium-term, job-hoppers that qualify themselves as managing profiles. They usually work for companies that have respectable names but lack selective skills and deliver average performances.

They often claim an impressive range of expertise in their CV and do this confidently because they are “discharged” from their jobs without evident demerit. This mostly happens because no IT manager would ever admit to having made the mistake of having hired them (on the other hand, one can always hope your competitor might hire them).

So they turn around, and around.

Today I had the chance to make such a re-encounter and there was no Bruce Willis coming to save me from this outer-space menace with a fleet of modified Shuttles.

It was a surrealistic meeting where the Elliptical Idiot was introduced as the chief Technical Pre-sales Architect of a major financial-risk rating software company. As a Pre-sales expert he showed his soft-touch just after 20 minutes into the conversation: in a crescendo of nonsense he effectively propelled uncertainty and fear, he contradicted himself and showed his total lack of knowledge of the solution my customer is supposed to purchase. All this at 1.250 Euro per day. VAT excluded.

I realized that I met this guy two years ago: he screened me for a job at a SaaS company. What should have been an interview to assess my skills rapidly transformed itself in something else as I realized he had no clue of what he was talking about (he was supposed to lead me). Scared enough I ended the interview before its time slot ran out (first time in my life).

See, the pattern matches:

• We have a structural idiot (I can affirm this by direct assessment)
• He worked for a known company with a quality issue (outsourcing gone awry, but this is another matter), he was just hired when I met him
• He left the company shortly afterward, his LinkedIn profile speaks of the high responsibility tasks he undertook
• He is now just hired by a company that sells respectable products but leaves a lot to desire in ability to execute. Here I meet him again.

His orbital period brings him nearby every 22 months, his appearances are brisk but fatal.

I warned my customer. It doesn’t mean the Elliptical Idiot will disappear in a fluff of combusted gas, rather, my customer will ask me and the team to coach the supplier and his architect, it means working twice as much to deliver the project.

Accountability, you know.

And the pattern repeats itself.