Exactly that, yes! IR receivers outside every exterior door to the building, and IR receivers in the elevators to control access on a floor-by-floor basis.
The fobs were visible by an IR camera (including the average smartphone) and could trivially be decoded as a short bit sequence with an IR sensor wired into a microphone jack, as the bit pattern was transmitted at ~audio rates.
Viscount has hilariously bad security. I used to live in a building in Toronto that used Viscount infrared fobs for access control. They were no more secure than TV remotes; no rolling codes, no encryption, nothing. An attacker could easily sit nearby with an IR receiver and collect everyone's fob codes at a distance, allowing access to all floors.
The first and best solution is to help these people improve, obviously. You've tried that, but it's not working quickly enough. (People can always be coached; some are just more coachable than others. When I hear that someone "isn't learning," that always reads to me as someone who's "learning more slowly than I have patience for.")
Then, the second-best solution is for management to move people around to other teams, or out of the company. Unfortunately, that's difficult and slow - and sometimes impossible, depending on the company culture or regulations.
Then, the third-best solution: move yourself to an environment with "better" people in it. This also may not be possible or desirable; job changes are difficult and can be risky.
So, the fourth-best (but most common) solution: make your peace with the situation by finding ways to become comfortable with the gap between your expectations of your colleagues and their actual performance.
Some strategies:
- Remind yourself that "the company pays me well to put up with this." (And if the company doesn't pay you well enough to make it worth it, then yes, absolutely leave. I assume Microsoft pays you well though.)
- Dig deep to find out what frustrates you about working with these people, and address those concerns instead. Are you frustrated because these people increase your workload? Are you worried that their lack of quality work will reflect poorly on you? Do you worry that they will compromise work that you care about? These are all insecurities that can be addressed.
- Remember that intelligence is not linear; nobody is strictly smarter than somebody else in every aspect of life. These people may be good at parts of their jobs that you don't see, in which case your expectations of these people may be what needs to change.