Revision to the Peter/Dilbert Principle, the ProjektAquarius principle: a company will systematically shift the least competent employee on to the assignments the competent employees can't be bothered to do until they become an integral part of the team and drag you down with them. (E.g. eventually they completely fuck up your delivery process, although it's probably still cheaper and quicker than having them do anything else.)

ProjektAquarius principle: A Case Study

We have an engineer who is getting paid quite a bit more than me. Over time his responsibilities have gradually been reduced to documentation and running our almost entirely automated build. Well today the build failed. He pulls me over to tell me, and says he's confused because there is a file there he has never seen before in there and a file he always has seen that isn't there (basically a file got renamed. It was not non-obvious). Answer: change the file name.

Then he comes over and tells us that it's failing again because the script is not finding a file. So a coworker of mine and I go over. He explains the whole build process to us when we ask if there is any point in the script that would help us identify where the script is looking for the file and failing (there wasn't but that's besides the point).

Turns out, he had decided to put the assembly list in order. Normally no problem, but the list is in source destination pairs. So the fucking file was being put in a different directory than the one the script was looking for it in and failing. And that's the story about how my company just paid 3 engineers a quarter of a man hour each for something that would have been resolved in 30 seconds via file search/copying and pasting a file path. Related note: our process for building an install is now about 4 hours long with no change on process besides the BCAK.