Ultimate Job Security requirement

The description at Ultimate Job Security mentions "may be damn good at what they do".

This implies that someone avoids being fired because they're good at the actual job.

The examples instead use it for anyone who should have been fired but wasn't because Status Quo Is God.

So is talent required or not?

Generally, the appearance of the word "may" indicates that it describes something that isn't necessarily required, and in this case I think it's meant to be read in reverse if anything, that not doing a good job isn't necessarily a requirement, but it's confused by the phrasing and coming at the very start of the description. The second paragraph seems to back this up by talking about how in real life, co-workers have to clean up the messes left by the person in question not being good at the job.

On the other hand, the oldest copy in the Internet Archive has the first sentence as the only substantial description the page has, and leads with at least two examples that are good at their jobs. These are also the only two examples in the OP of the original YKTTW (retrieved by pulling up the discussion page from the Archive), which, however, does not mention anything about the character being good at the job in the actual description, and the people contributing to it seem to have a broader idea of what the trope is.

The use of the trope is a character who should have been fired for workplace/criminal violations but isn't. Whether they're actually competent at the job seems not to be relevant. Perhaps the trope is too broad, since a lot of examples are a YMMV-leaning "why hasn't this person been fired?"

Edited by Tabs on Nov 11th 2023 at 11:21:39 AM

Hm, if it comes to wickchecking, there's probably a room for an argument to split between "The higher-ups can't fire this guy" and "How on earth he keeps his job?"

I would say the core trope is a character is explicitly able to maintain their job through rough patches due to a number of different factors:

• They are part of a union and that requires extra hoops for their boss to jump through.
• They have upper management connections and their immediate boss doesn't want to piss off their current boss (alternatively, they have a Friend on the Force and don't want law enforcement trouble).
• They are a Bunny-Ears Lawyer and too exceptional at their job to fire over a small mishap.
• They are the only one capable of doing even the bare minimum of the job and the hassle of finding a replacement is too much.

You could theoretically split each one into their own trope, but I don't think it really changes the core idea. An example that merely wonders how they keep their job but without any of the above would be more like One-Hour Work Week.