Oh, I should have been more careful in my formulation:
There are organisations that are generally competent, and there are places that are less competent. It's not all that uncommon for the whole organisation to be generally incompetent.
The saddest places (for me) are those where almost every individual you talk to seems generally competent, but judging by their output the company might as well be stuffed by idiots. Something in the way they are organised suppresses the competence. (I worked at one such company.)
> Maybe I have just been lucky, but I have not had the displeasure of working with people either tha incompetent or willfully ignorant yet.
It's very important before you start any new job to suss out how competent people and the organisation are. Ideally, you probably want to work for a competent company. But at least you want to know what you are getting into.
There's a bit of luck involved, if you go in blindly, but you can also use skill and elbow-grease to investigate.
Yes, it's hard, and I'm not sure there are general strategies that always work.
It's fundamentally the same problem that the company is trying to solve when they interview you, just the other way 'round.
Some ideas: observe and ask in the interviews and hiring process in general. See what you can find out about the company from friends, contacts and even strangers. Network! Do some online research, too.
Btw, lots of the cliché interview questions ("What are your greatest weaknesses?" etc) actually make decent questions you can ask about the company and team you are about to join.
Something I've found useful is just reaching out to past employees. Usually folks that don't work there anymore will be more transparent. Only challenge is getting someone to respond to you, but you'd be surprised how many folks will talk if you don't come off like you're trying to sell them something or a bot.
Not only does the Peter principle generally show more incompetence the higher up a structure you move, but the outsized influence those positions have make for a very noticeably higher level of “things fucked up by incompetence“ coming from the C suite compared to the rest of the structure.
There’s definitely plenty of incompetence regardless. But I’ve never seen a company where the incompetence was more noteworthy in the cog positions than “leadership”.
