Watching a co-worker self destruct

About six months ago we were looking for someone to handle the DBA role at our company. They would also be reponsible for doing night time deployments to our live site. Because of the industry we are in, it is very critical that we get our deployments out precisely when they are scheduled. Any kind of screw up in this process can have dire consequences for our company, so we took a long time looking through the applicants. As usual we didn't have a shortage of applicants, just a shortage of qualified ones. We had devised a rather rigorous test to give to people, and my boss was comparing all of the applicant scores to my score and to another co-worker's score. Both of us scored extremely high, and we were having difficulty finding someone that scored even half as well as we did on that test. If someone scored reasonably well on the test we would bring them in for an interview. Interviewing with my company is sort of a juggernaut, each person usually gets interviewed by five different groups of people. If you are lucky you then get to come back for three more interviews. We had been doing this process for several months when we finally found the guy we were going to hire. He scored reasonably well on the test, so we brought him in.

He was the type of guy who marches to his own drum. Very unique, but he was pretty sharp. I had some concerns about hiring him, and discussed them with my boss, but ultimately we hired him anyway. Over the next few months he got into the job, and largely my concerns were born out. I won't belabor the details. He was on probation for previous screw ups, when friday morning my boss comes in and says to me, "You know how wednesday you mentioned we should start a pool for when X will get himself fired? I want to bet $100 on today"

My boss then explained to me how this employee who was supposed to work a night shift, went and got completely smashed before coming to work. So instead of doing the nightly deployments, that are critical, he never came into work. He never called anyone or said anything. My boss called him friday morning and asked about a different problem, and while he was on the phone with him he noticed none of the deployments were done. So when X came into the office, he was fired on the spot.

It surprises me that anyone would take this type of self destructive behavior to that level. This was by far the best job the guy had ever had, he was making more money than ever before and he had a really lax schedule. To see someone throw that all away for one night of drunkeness is a terrible waste in my opinion.