[lemmsjid]

Huh! If I reflect back on my involvement in projects that had difficulties, there was rarely a dearth of competent people, and in fact it was often political and communication concerns that led to suffering.

Look at Conway’s Law: “any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.”

The “kind” people are the people who optimize an organization’s communication structure by helping competent people to have a voice and not be impeded by political wrangling.

In short, I think it’s the ‘kind’ people who can help an organization realize an architecture that is less warped by political considerations and more true to the customer’s needs.

Of course an organization needs both kindness and competence. In my decades in tech, competence was over-valued in my early years (the worship of the trope of the rockstar-but-asshole programmer), so if there is an overindication towards kindness right now, it is probably a counterbalance.

I would also question your conclusion about the government. While I have not worked in the government myself, I come from a sort of “federal government family”, in that I have multiple close family who have spent decades in federal government roles, and they are full of stories of incompetent managers undermining their employees, politically fighting one another, etc. To your point, they also have plenty of stories of crass incompetence, Nepotism, etc. But I think it’s an easy and incorrect answer to say it’s simply due to “HR-values” as opposed to “engineering-values”: it’s multi-faceted in both directions.

[Jensson]

> not be impeded by political wrangling

All that need for political wrangling was created by incompetent kind people. Getting more of those just creates more of those issues, if not at your place its at others, its an arms race.

[lemmsjid]

Personally, I find a team seems to be healthiest if a mixture of personalities are on it. They should all be competent.

When it comes to incompetence, people can hide that behind kindness, or behind bluster and bullying. Both are certainly unhealthy. I wouldn’t say one leads to issues over the other.