I got news for you about IT ... if you're talking IT Engineering, not IT Support or some other genre. It's all about the image you project coupled with a marginal skill coincided with an employer's need. Over the last 15 years, I've seen not just inept people take up senior engineer and designer positions, but downright useless and dangerous. They got hired because the company needed someone who looked the part, looked like they would mesh with "the culture", had the right resume keywords, and passed an HR screen. Not only that, but when their coworkers' shitty feedback finally makes its way through a couple of semi-annual reviews, they would have moved on to some other company rotation. Some even had the audacity to come back! With higher pay!
But this one case I've personally witnessed takes the goddamned cake.
A semi-useless middle-aged coder (one of those dudes who takes 2 weeks to close a single Jira ticket and then when you try to close the sprint they announce they had a blocker) worked at a Fortune 500 company with me for about 6 months as a contractor. The company offered full-time positions to about half of us, including me, and I took the offer. The dude, let's call him Kevin, didn't get hired. Instead, he was given a few grand to hang tight and try to finish some bullshit flat file parser he'd been raping for the better portion of the year. Thinking the tool would be complete soon, the company swept him up in the next round of hires, and he accepted. Later I learned he also used his elevated temporary contractor fees to negotiate a considerably better offer than any of us, like, 10 grand higher.
For the next year he was skirting any serious discussion about performance, using everything from sicknesses to kids, trips to migranes, reorganizations to holiday breaks in order to just do nothing and collect the paycheck. I don't exaggerate when I say he did nothing. He checked in no code, submitted the same status for his projects, and used every conceivable trick to weasel out of producing direct, tangible results. I know it's a failure of management, but nevertheless.
After the big 08 crash he's one of the first people to get walked out. "Justice!", we all think. "How we can hire someone good!" Not so fast, it's a hiring freeze, but Kevin kept the 4+ months of severance. Two weeks later I see him in the cafeteria. "Hey ... dude ...", I'm taken aback. "They brought me back as a contractor!", he explained.
Six more months of trying to finish the tool while doing the required minimum daily maintenance on it. The contract ends, he leaves after enjoying the consultant fees. Three months later he's back as a permanent employee thanks in no small part to his previous brief employment and the bullshit artistry. He spent the next 2 years rotating around the company until being laid off again, WITH ANOTHER SEVERANCE PACKAGE.
We intersected later at some random local event, and he told me some financial comparisons that pointed in the direction of $40,000 - $60,000 pre tax in fees and packages on top of his normal six-figure engineering salary.
My friends and I just felt like that Spiderman meme. And here we are, working late, trying to deploy a release ...