Unethical Coworker
Disclaimer: grammer and formatting were assisted by AI.
Hi guys,
First-time poster, long-time lurker.
Anyway, I recently joined a medium-to-large-sized engineering and surveying firm as a survey field tech. I came into the job with some previous field experience under my belt, and generally, it's been an awesome gig. All of my coworkers are great, have taught me a lot, and allow me to work with autonomy with the exception of one guy.
This guy is a control freak, to the point of telling me how to swing a hammer and hardly ever allowing me to run the equipment. (I can swing a hammer just fine, and I have completed solo layout, retracement, topo, staking, setting markers, etc., in the past and with other field staff at my company.)
What prompts me to write this post is that I have observed unethical behaviour from him:
Time theft: He regularly charges an extra 0.5 to 1 hour every single day.
Ignoring contractors: He fails to listen to contractors' requests on construction sites. For example, they ask for x-foot offsets on the inside, and he gives them x-foot offsets on the outside (even though I try to tell him that's not what was asked for). Or, they ask for a particular gridline laid out, and he lays out footings instead, which are perpendicular to the requested gridline (and when I point this out, he shuts me down). These are just two examples of many.
Horribly inefficient approach to jobs: tells me to set the gun up somewhere (to which I say hey man this isn't going to work for what we need to do) yet he tells me to do it anyway, and of course it doesn't work out. Layout for high precision jobs is done with the 1.5m pole and 360 prism without a bipod, but he extends it to 1.7m for literally no reason. I'll say hey shouldn't we use the peanut prism and he just ignores me.
Faking accuracy: If a nail or marker we set isn't where it needs to be, instead of letting me adjust it after I set it, he will just lean the pole to fake it.
What's a newbie to do? I'm still in my probationary period, and nobody else at my company operates like him. Thankfully we aren't always paired up, but for the last couple weeks we have been and I want to pull my hair out.
I know I can do better work than him, with more integrity. I highly value integrity. He only has a few months more experience than me.
Edit: I am a woman and he is an immigrant who's residency is tied to maintaining employment. I'm not trying to ruin his life I just don't want to work with him any more. Like I said, this is not my experience with literally any of the other field crew. He's a nice enough guy and we get along well, but he's a horrible survey tech.