Okay, after months of covertly observing a coworker, I have enough material to share this.
About 9 months ago this guy, let's call him Mario, was transferred from another project onto my team. Now for this story to make sense you have to understand that there is a huge disparity in skill among employees at this company. While we are all developing software, some projects are real engineering who have wickedly smart people working on them, and some other are like janitorial maintenance of crappy applications. Mario's previous project was the latter.
After 6 months of my team, it becomes clear that he is a terrible software engineer. His skills after two years at this company still haven't reached what you could reasonably expect from a CompSci student doing a summer internship before his senior year. Either this either wasn't apparent previously because it wasn't needed in his previous project, or his manager swept it under the rug. Mario is also highly delusional and convinced that he is hot shit, despite the fact that we basically kicked him off our team to move him to another team within the same project where he could hopefully gain from a gentler learning curve doing less cutting edge stuff.
He is also a member of the local toastmasters chapter, which, upon further inspection and attendance of the after-mentioned session that I attended, is about as interesting and mentally stimulating as a trip to the DMV. Two months ago he made a presentation and invited us all to watch, where he basically bragged about being financially responsible and buying a home at "only" 26 years of age. Now to his credit, the idea is that he is getting roommates and basically living for free (not sure if that's actually panned out yet). Upon pressing for details, he revealed that he is doing the 3.5% percent down mortgage with high PMI... on a 120k house.
Today at lunch it was revealed that he has been put on a performance improvement plan a few weeks ago. He is convinced that they have an axe to grind against him, and totally doesn't realize that this means he's about to get fired (as he should). Instead, he went and purchased a $16,000 sports motorcycle. For those of you who know nothing about motorcycles, that is a ridiculously nice bike. He is paying over $500/month for payments and full coverage insurance, and doesn't know his interest rate.
When I not-so-subtly tried to warn him that performance improvement plans can mean firing, he dismissed it saying he would get unemployment insurance. Unemployment insurance caps out at about $1,300/month in this state.