Holy hell... so today he took a bunch of work that he had been working on locally, and moved it back to the server... And, in the process, he overwrote one of the documents that I had been working on, which he had not been working on. The damn thing is about two weeks out of date now.
I swear, we work for the same place. (if the staff numbers weren't drastically different). We've had guys pull the "I prefer to work on my local machine" - for various reasons, including "I don't want to mess up, if I leave a copy on the server I can mess up the local copy, and always have a backup".
We make it explicitly known that this is not allowed. Both because of the file management nightmare you just experienced, and because our local machines are not backed up - the server is. All work must be saved on the server, no exceptions.
And we had a new hire last year that I finally had to sit down and explain to him that, "You've worked here three months. We've been doing this for decades. There is literally nothing we are going to ask you to do in the next year that has not been done at least once already. There is ALWAYS an example for you to follow. Before you create a new document, come see one of us. There is one you should be using, formatted how we need it to be."
About that same time, he had been started working on a very complex, in-depth process (takes us about 4 months start to finish to get through). On the technical side of things, I *am* the office expert on it. I was gone on vacation, and he told my engineer that he was going to try and rewrite one of our calculation spreadsheets. Engineer told him no, use the sheets you were given as an example. He mentioned it to me. Told him no, there are reasons the sheets are set up the way they are. I leave on vacation for a week, and when I come back, he comes back to my desk all happy and proud of himself, because he rewrote the spreadsheet. Looked it over for a few minutes, and while it worked for that specific project, it did not take into *other* factors commonly present on those types of projects. After reviewing it, and still having this happy little puppy just beaming with pride at my desk...
Me: Do you remember Brian telling you not to spend any time doing this, just use the sheet that is already set up?
Him: Um..yeah, bu...
Me: Do you also remember me telling you that the existing sheet has been set up for a decade, and has been error-tested on over a dozen projects, and not to fix something that isn't broken?
Him: But I made it better.....
Me: After being told twice specifically NOT to spend any time on it. And it's not better. It does not allow for <situation A> <situation B> or <situation C>. There is a REASON we told you to use the templates we have set up. You don't have NEARLY the understanding of the total process you would need to start making changes. If you have questions about how a process works, or think you might have a suggestion to improve it, that's fine. But come talk to me or Brian. Because you don't know enough to know what you don't know. Now throw this away, and go back and do it the way we told you to two weeks ago.
I thought he was going to cry.