New hire with “20 years of experience” refuses to listen to coworker training her, reveals confidential information after being told not to: ‘I know what I’m doing'

Cata Holmes • Writer

Aug 29, 2026 8:00 AM EDT

How do you train someone who thinks 20 years of experience means they have nothing left to learn?

Multiple things are going wrong in this workplace story shared by u/One_Sell_250. From the start, there's no office manager… and that just sounds completely off. Because of that, when a new employee comes in and someone has to teach them how to do things, another employee is given the task, although it's not their responsibility. And things start to go wrong, and mistakes are made.

The mistakes are not the bad part: we all make mistakes, especially if we're starting at a new job. The problem is the attitude and the way we face the people who are there to teach us what not to do, so that next time we can avoid doing them. This woman, who just joined the company, apparently has 20 years of experience in the field and was not willing to let anyone teach her how to do things. She did what they told her at her past job, thinking it was enough. And, of course, it was not.

The writer said he was with her most of the time, and whenever she did something wrong, she wouldn't listen to him and would defend herself. This leaves no room for improvement, and the employee who's teaching her is very exhausted and not cooperative. And since there's no office manager, he has to complain directly to the owner of the company…

The worst part of all was when this woman revealed confidential information to a client, something that is never supposed to happen since this is private to the company and their own procedures. If you ask me, after the multiple mistakes and the poor cooperation. I'd have done something to get fired. But that wasn't the case, and she's still working there and doing her own things. If nobody steps in and can stop her, worse things can happen, and more confidential information can be revealed…

*Factory employee working with industrial equipment on the production floor.*
*Model representation.*

I work for a small metal distrubution company and somehow ended up being responsible for training new employees even though I'm not actually their manager.

The problem is, there literally is no manager in our office. There's no supervisor sitting there overseeing us. The only actual person above us is the owner of the company, so I've basically been thrown into this weird

position where I'm expected to train people and make sure they're doing things correctly, but I have absolutely no real authority over them.

The newest person I'm training constantly brings up that she has "20 years of experience," and whenever I explain how we do

something here, I get responses like "I know what I'm doing," "I can read,” or “that's not how we did it at my old job."

The problem is that she keeps trying to use procedures from her previous workplace instead of following ours.

Recently there was an order that needed to be bundled together instead of separated. I explained multiple times that this is how we handle it here, but she kept arguing with me because her old company apparently did it differently.

I finally got so fed up that I went directly to the owner because, again, there is literally nobody else for me to escalate this to. The owner agreed with me and told her to fix the mistake.

She fixed it, but then immediately called the company receiving the order and asked them something along the lines of, "Your order is going to be bundled instead of separated, is that okay?"

*New employee operating machinery in a metalworking facility.*
*Actor performance of story events.*

I genuinely don't understand why that phone call was even necessary. The OWNER had already told her to correct it. It wasn't a customer decision, it was an internal procedure.

This has been happening constantly. She has missed work that needed to be completed, argued with me when I pointed it out, and even started yelling at me when I noticed something was missing.

There was also a much more serious situation where I specifically told her not to process something because there was an issue with the account.

Instead of just following that instruction, she told an outside customer information about another company's pricing and payment situation that absolutely should not have been disclosed.

Now I'm dealing with backlash over something I was literally trying to prevent.

She also gets angry when I check her work or remind her about things. I've reminded her multiple times to complete something, only for it to still not be done. If I step in and do it because it needs to be finished, she gets angry that I didn't tell her first.

But if I leave her alone and something gets missed, I'm still the person who was supposed to be training her.

I already complained directly to the owner about her attitude and the fact that she refuses to listen to me. I was basically told that if I explain something and she chooses not to listen, let her make the mistake.

*Employees walking through a metal distribution factory.*
*Representative only.*

At this point I'm doing exactly that because I genuinely don't know what else I'm supposed to do.

There is no office manager I can hand this off to. There is no supervisor who can stand there and correct her. It's basically me trying to train her, and if things get bad enough, I have to go directly to the owner of the entire company.

I'm not her manager. I'm not even supposed to be managing employees. I'm just the person they assigned to train her because there is nobody else in the office to do it.

I can explain our procedures, point out mistakes and escalate serious problems to the owner, but I can't force someone to listen when they've already decided that "20 years of experience" means they know better than the person actually teaching them how this company works.

From this story, we can all learn that no matter the amount of experience you have in a certain industry or field, there's always room to keep learning. Mistakes can be made, but being humble and saying sorry afterward is the answer.

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New hire with “20 years of experience” refuses to listen to coworker training her, reveals confidential information after being told not to: ‘I know what I’m doing'

How do you train someone who thinks 20 years of experience means they have nothing left to learn?

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