Is NOBODY wrong in the post ? POST : I work at a very large engineering company writing and testing software.  There are some big projects with very high visibility among management that I have been working on for about two years, and these projects admittedly have a very high learning curve, so it takes about 6 months before someone that is new really knows what they are doing.

When I was brand new on my first big project, management paired me with a few senior engineers so I would have all the help I needed, and I was given multiple small tasks to work on so I could familiarize myself with the system and software architecture.  By the time I started on the second project (this current one), I'm much more proficient and many higher-ups are the ones asking me questions.

That being said, my project is terribly understaffed and I am doing basically all the software development for this project (which is why I have had to learn quickly).  In an effort to alleviate my workload, management brought in a new college hire James about a month ago.  He has been with the company for about a year and this is his first big project, so he was still essentially brand new.

My project manager just kind of dumped James on me and said "find things for him to do".  I understand that I am probably a good person to train a new hire because I was just new myself and I know how overwhelming it can be, so I let him shadow me and see the procedures I go through on a daily basis as well as gave him some very small tasks and vague stuff like reading through the code and trying to understand it.

I quickly noticed that he is extremely, extremely softspoken and painfully shy, so even when he does talk it is so quiet I can't understand what he's saying. I need him to repeat at least three times.  Because of that, he doesn't ask many questions and spends our sessions just like "ok .... ok .... ok".  Even when he does have a question it shows that he's not really listening because it doesn't quite make sense.  An analogy is that I could be explaining how the toaster is broken and he might say "Does it have anything to do with the oven?" and I'm like "what? no".

Then I assign him a task and he just sits next to me watching me, despite having a new task.  It really feels like he is not taking the initiative to learn or try to complete his tasks, but at the same time I think he might just be confused and unprepared if I unknowingly suck at training.

Our work lets us make our own hours (9/80 schedule) so I get to our software lab at about 7am and work until lunch.  He gets there around 10:30am every day (which is fine as long as he stays later). Whenever I finish my work and get up to leave, whether it is at 10:31am or noon, he leaves with me, so I don't think he works when I'm not there.  It's annoyingly clingy.

We have weekly status meetings and when it's his turn just to give a quick blurb of what he's been doing, he always just says "I'm still shadowing eggdunk".  Then our managers kind of come down on me like "come on you need to give him better things to do, he must be so bored" and I don't want to just sell him out because I did give him things to do, he just doesn't do them and continues to watch me every day even though it doesn't help.

I send daily status emails to the project manager on my work, and also include a line of "Today I assigned James to [do task]".  When the manager asks him how it is going, he goes "yeah I'm still working on it".

The other day he actually asked me for more work and I reiterated the list of things I already asked him to do.

It's been about two months now, but he basically still acts the same as he did on the first day.  The daily routine is simply that he arrives at 10:30, watches me, leaves when I leave, and then I work in a different area so I don't see him in the afternoon, but I can't imagine that he's doing work.

It's slowing me down a bit because it's distracting and when he does complete a task I need to double check it, and also his ever-shadowing presence just annoys me.

My mentors were very patient with me and answered any questions I had and helped fix things that I broke, but I felt like I put in a lot of effort, and James is not.