[nabnob]

Those hyper-competent nice devs can turn incompetent engineers into competent ones, though, and have such a huge impact on work culture that they bring everyone else up with them too. A lot of incompetence can just be inexperience, not understanding what the priorities are and getting overwhelmed.

[manicennui]

I have never found this to be the case. It is almost always a combination of low ability to learn anything, needing to be told exactly what to do frequently, and eating up lots of other people's time, and none of this improves over time. The other situation I've seen is people who basically do little to no work and make no attempt to really hide it. I've never seen either of these situations resolved successfully, no matter how many times they are moved around, or coached, or allowed to eat up the time of those who get things done.

[throwaway2037]

You are hinting about an important third trait: persistence (effort). I am not the nicest person, nor the smartest, but I am very persistent. This can make-up for other shortfalls. When hiring, if I cannot find highly competent, then I will sacrifice some niceness for more persistence. Never hire people who are low effort / not persistent. Some much of office work is "following up" to make sure that things are completed -- non-managers included. People with low effort will frequently complete tasks to 80-90%, then need to be managed across the finish line.

Edit

About: <<needing to be told exactly what to do frequently, and eating up lots of other people's time>>

I recommend that you Google: youtube casino blueberry muffin

Watch that two minute clip. It ends with this quote: <<Like everything else in this place, if you don't do it yourself, it never gets done.>>

I often mutter "blueberry muffins" to myself when it is easier to do it myself than ask someone (multiple times) to do it, and the results will be incomplete or low quality.

[908B64B197]

> and none of this improves over time.

That doesn't match what I've observed.

There's an initial phase where a new hire, no matter the level, will require hand-holding, especially if transitioning to a new language of level of abstraction.

Not seeing any improvement points at either a completely broken onboarding process, or sub-par candidates. There's a chance you simply have a poor hiring pool. I recall a story someone told me a while ago. Software business that did local CoL/prevailing wages. Hired an intern one summer that was just running around in circles around the other, more senior devs. Useless to say they loved him and the next summer they tried to get him back, even offering a signing bonus for an internship (something they considered unheard of) but he was already at a large search engine company down in the Bay. You can guess the comp was probably already 3x what his previous job was offering. Of course, he wouldn't return.

There's a whole class of engineers were completely invisible to most companies, even if they are in the same "local market" (Some use the term "dark matter devs" but I know it has another meaning). These guys tend to fly under the radar quite a bit. If you are in a tier 2 market or company, your chances of attracting one are close to nil. Because they are extremely valuable, they don't interview a lot and tend to hop between companies where they know people (or get fast tracked internally).

FAANG companies have internship pipelines, with bonus for returning interns. These guys are off the market years before they even graduate.

[icedchai]

The sort of competence I think about is more of an innate ability to learn and figure out things on your own. Some people simply cannot do this. They need very specific instructions and hand holding.

They won't read documentation. They won't Google for an answer. They won't look at error logs. They won't browse around in the code to see what other people have done similarly. They won't look at the git history.

You can build experience by doing these things, even if you don't have any. If you are inexperienced and don't at least try to do them... well... that's incompetence.

[neeleshs]

As long as it's the latter - inexperience - yes. But a lot of the time it's just the aptitude and that cannot be taught (easily). I've seen my fair share of experienced, nice people with less that good aptitude for the job. A year later being nice and teaching, I see marginal improvement at a huge cost. It's not worth it at least in startups. I've also seen many young devs with the right aptitude but no knowledge/experience and they've turned out to be assets within a short period of time.

[gladiatr72]

It depends on the source of your competency.

If you came by your understanding through bone-headed determination, you might have an inkling of how to explain concepts to someone who just doesn't seem to get it.

If you are someone who just 'got it', your ability to teach someone who doesn't might be the limiting factor.

[deebosong]

Kinda sounds like what a buddy told me about Michael Jordan vs Steve Kerr.

Not saying Jordan can't make a good coach, but someone like Kerr apparently was better able to coach due to being a specialist and knowing what the roles were and understanding his limits, whereas Michael Jordan – not to say he in any way lacked basketball IQ – just had an order of magnitude more talent than even the cream of the crop (arguably), and was better suited to execution.

Goes without saying though that Jordan was known to just be utterly ruthless on the court, being unnecessarily cruel, and always needing to dominate and win. Which is fun and entertaining as an audience with a bit of distance, but I personally wouldn't enjoy having to be near that kind of personality.

[jahewson]

I’ve not found that they can be taught. An inexperienced person may lack the knowledge of what to do but they can learn to ask, to read a book, to follow the state-of-the-art. An incompetent person will decide they know what to do (or wrongly conclude that that no one can possibly know what to do) and charge off in the wrong direction at 1000 miles per hour.

[uoaei]

> A lot of incompetence can just be inexperience, not understanding what the priorities are and getting overwhelmed.

This is the job of the manager to resolve. If that person really is incompetent rather than merely unfamiliar with the work, the manager has access to assets such as hyper-competent nice people for mentoring the less-competent, and should coordinate between the mentor and mentee to lift people out of incompetency.