Tales of the Competency Crisis - How do I into anything?

[Bowman Dan]

As far as I can tell, there isn’t a singular dedicated thread made for stories and discussion of the Competency Crisis. Which is odd seeing as how often it's referenced and discussed everywhere else.

However, since this is an OP I’ll start with some relevant info and a few opinions I’ve commonly seen on the matter.


What is the Competency Crisis?

Surprisingly self-explanatory, a crisis of competency.
In general, it’s the notion that systems seen in everyday life are unable to be properly maintained and/or innovated due to a lack of skills required to effectively do so. Keep in mind this isn't exclusive to tech, although it may play a large role. I’m sure you can probably give half a dozen stories off the top of your head of something that fits this description.


Examples of the Competency Crisis

Just a few things you might hear about:

• Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc always seem to be pulling some dumb shit that can only be explained through incompetence.
• That 65 year old sysadmin keeping your entire company together because his first language is BASIC, FORTRAN, COBOL, or something similar.
• Boomers unable to use tech due to not being familiar with anything.
• Zoomers/Gen Alpha unable to use tech due to being iPad babies or something.
• Some 2D pixel game being 850mb because the developer built it in Unity and doesn’t how the fuck to optimize their code or use efficient assets.
• People not knowing how their own car works. I don’t mean the deep intricacies, I mean shit like not knowing how to change a tire.
• And the list goes on

What causes the Competency Crisis?

This doesn’t have a single clear answer but more a combination of multiple overlapping factors. For instance:

• Increase in AI related technology.
• Low skilled mass immigration flooding workforces, reducing quality (See: The India Menace).
• Probably something with Zoomers being on their phones too much, or Boomers unwilling to pass on their skills.
• DEI and other similar programs incentivizing companies to not hire the best. Could say something about overbearing HR culture in larger companies as well.
• Substandard education systems, Zoomers and Millennials entering the workforce underprepared and untrained in relevant fields.

None of these are independent, each of these can have relations drawn to any other point.


Is the Competency Crisis exaggerated, or even real?

Sounds weird to say in the thread dedicated to it, but there are counterpoints I’ve seen:

• AI is mostly used to automate tedious menial tasks that can free up time to do more important work.
• Companies love money. If they’re losing money because people aren’t performing, some “restructuring” is usually on the horizon.
• A lot of the discussion is focused on American (more generally western) tech and societies, but as much as much as we don’t want to admit it, the rest of the world can make innovations too.
• With the recent election of Donald Trump and establishment of the Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Is the Competency Crisis something that can be tackled by a government restructure? Or is it something deeper?
• Zoomers are entering the workforce with more technology and easier access to tools than any prior generation. What would previously take years to create can now take months or weeks depending on the workflow.

These are all points off the top of my head, don’t take them as mandatory discussion topics.

And if you have any interesting stories of things you’ve seen/heard (excluding PL of course) please share them. It’ll be good to have a thread filled with stuff dedicated to just this.

Edit: Formatting

 

[Dysnomia]

• Boomers unable to use tech due to not being familiar with anything.
• Zoomers/Gen Alpha unable to use tech due to being iPad babies or something.

It's crazy how boomers and zoomers are equally tech retarded. You'd think the younger generations would be even better with computers and general tech. But phonefagging has turned their brains to mush.

 

[Blue Flying Leaf]

That's because we can print money, but we can't print competent people. They are born and raised properly. Given we have none of those now you see what you see.

 

[NerdShamer]

It's crazy how boomers and zoomers are equally tech retarded. You'd think the younger generations would be even better with computers and general tech. But phonefagging has turned their brains to mush.

At least the boomers have the very convenient excuse of slowly going senile

 

[Bowman Dan]

It's crazy how boomers and zoomers are equally tech retarded. You'd think the younger generations would be even better with computers and general tech. But phonefagging has turned their brains to mush.

Something something horseshoe theory.

 

[Summer of George]

Too many talented people aren't having kids. They see how shitty the world already is: how personal stupidity is rewarded in the courts, in media, in politics, in business, yada yada. They lack confidence that they'll be able to correctly raise hard-working kids in this sort of society, so they avoid.
Also, the schools have become de facto creches. It's just a place to drop your kid for 8 hours while you go to work. Most households require two working parents to earn enough money. Neither parent has enough time to give the child close attention. So even if they manage to withhold smartphones and vidya, the developmental imprint left on the kid's brain is being much more heavily influenced by teachers and peers than it is by the parents. Compounding the problem is the fact that school personnel aren't allowed to discipline children in any meaningful way - too much legal liability.
All of this has been the case for about the last 25 years, at least.

 

[regalterry]

Germany is Germany because of Germans, the UK is the UK because of the British, South Africa and Rhodesia were prosperous countries because of the Boers.

When you replace those populations with inferior stock you get failed states, because complex systems require a homogenous population capable of producing and supporting a cadre of experts that know how to keep those systems going, and how to improve them.

And the problem can be traced back to liberal dogma - they would rather put all of us in danger and crater our standards of living before admitting that humans are not interchangeable economic units, and that importing infinite numbers of niggers, pakis and jeets is not going to make our lives better.

The problem eventually becomes self-replicating, the token hires the liberals put in power to feel good about themselves start to feel threatened by employees hired on merit, since they are a threat to their grift, and begin purging their organization of such individuals and replacing them with members of their own tribe or, if those are not available, with even more incompetent buffoons that can't be a threat to them.

Eventually, you get where the West currently is, countries still barely functioning because the old, quality stock is still around (and can't be easily replaced without putting everyone up in arms), but everyone knowing that as soon as they are too old to maintain the infrastructure, it's all going to shit.

Or you get a South Africa situation - the swarthy, subhuman biomass becomes the majority and wrests control from Whites (with the aid of liberal traitors) and turn the place into a failed state within a decade.

 

[Gregis]

It's crazy how boomers and zoomers are equally tech retarded. You'd think the younger generations would be even better with computers and general tech. But phonefagging has turned their brains to mush.

It's obvious why; companies making the shit don't want their customers to do general purpose computing. Computer means general purpose computer, i.e. like a calculator but you can program it to do arbitrarily complex computations with minimal human intervention, or even play games, or introduce memory leaks that break everything (maybe even on purpose). When you program out these computations in sequence, that's an app, short for application, i.e. an application of computing resources. What really makes it powerful is the code for these apps is stored exactly the same way as the memory resources they operate on, and if you want to get really fancy you can write programs that rewrite their own code during execution. You can do any fucking thing with a computer.

Except not modern computers. I think on macs now, if you want to use a terminal window you actually have to go into settings and unlock it and then download developer tools. Good fucking luck on an iphone. Kids don't know what an app is other than you press a button to get it, press another button to open it, and it does some shit and shows you ads. Any program you run is code sitting on your own computer, and even if the developers don't make it easy, you can go into that code, figure out what it's doing, and change it however you want; do you think the people making a new Call of Duty every year want you to know that? That with enough time you can mod their game to do whatever you want? Any website you load on a browser has to send you all the code to make it look the way it does, otherwise it couldn't load; everything that goes into it is sitting on your own computer to do whatever you want with it, even make changes yourself. Do you think people trying to show you ads on websites want you to know that? A lot of them don't even want this stuff to be legal, not that there's much of a way to stop it for anyone determined enough.

Saint Terry knew all about this. Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc. have all been growing themselves a big herd of niggercattle.

 

[ZazietheBeast]

As someone working in the education sector in Commiefornia, I can tragically confirm that much of the programs in place aren't there to make the next citizen. It is there to create peons. Lots of genderspecial posters, propaganda posters pretending to be manners. Not helping is the pozzed books they're making mandatory reads in class. Whole thread on indoctrination books in schools.

The curriculum is sadly retarded and there to browbeat you into submission. And not helping is that any spark to become great is snuffed by the imports they have. Who are a little more than happy to break down anyone who displays anything intelligent. And to no-one's surprise, nogs are the biggest ones to perpetuate this insanity. The various casserole of browns aren't helping either. Just causing more strife than I'd like to admit.

The most horrifying part of all of this is that schools have moved onto handing ipads to kids. This is even in grade school. We already know how destructive that shit is in the development of a child. TV is bad but at least the kid can't run around with it. But with ipads, you can bring anywhere and effectively eats away at your attention. While it does have a pacifying effect, it also robs the kid of any ability to imagine. Why learn how to imagine stuff when you have a distraction box you can flip on at a moment's notice? This shit is unironically creating more NPCs as a result.

Now, if you are unable to imagine, you will find it difficult to solve problems. As a result, you'll just try to find an answer using the devil's box. Maybe it will give you an answer. But other times, it will give you the fastest path in winning a Darwin award. Thankfully, no-one in campus has won such an award just yet. But yes, the education system as it currently stands contributes greatly in the Competency Crisis.

TL;DR: The Public Education sector in Commiefornia is a complete shitshow. Homeschool them or take them to a non backwards state.

Too many talented people aren't having kids. They see how shitty the world already is: how personal stupidity is rewarded in the courts, in media, in politics, in business, yada yada. They lack confidence that they'll be able to correctly raise hard-working kids in this sort of society, so they avoid.
Also, the schools have become de facto creches. It's just a place to drop your kid for 8 hours while you go to work. Most households require two working parents to earn enough money. Neither parent has enough time to give the child close attention. So even if they manage to withhold smartphones and vidya, the developmental imprint left on the kid's brain is being much more heavily influenced by teachers and peers than it is by the parents. Compounding the problem is the fact that school personnel aren't allowed to discipline children in any meaningful way - too much legal liability.
All of this has been the case for about the last 25 years, at least.

Tragically, Idiocracy is prophecy. Unironically, the only way out of this is to embrace multi-generational households again like it was in the early days. Not gonna happen thanks to alot of media demonizing the formation of such a unit. Of course, done by big biz to prevent any rivals from showing up as they amass money and resources.

 

[Meriasek]

Education is a big issue; even if there's a 180° in all education systems right now, there's a whole generation of young people where a significant portion has wasted many years on absolutely pointless "education". They lack critical thinking, logic, perseverance, and even general common sense. This has been going on for decades, too, so it affects quite a few. Not that everyone born after, say, 1995 or so is irredeemably dumbed down, there are those who prospered despite the general decline of education, but a very significant part of those generations was held back by it.
People rag on Boomers, but besides Gen X it was still Boomers who developed much of the foundations of modern technology, and who have the most fundamental insight into how things work. They still hold leadership positions in all the research groups and basically hold all the fundamental knowledge. With them gone, there's gonna be a vacuum of leadership and competence that Gen X is gonna struggle to fill, and following them, the Millenials.

Idiocracy really is prophecy. It's just gonna be much faster, and much browner.

 

[Cougar Pump]

There's a piece missing here, although I don't have a great name for it I guess you could call it 'Distance from fundamentals'.

Over time especially in a field that has developed rapidly we move away from the base fundamentals of the discipline and advance in a way that eventially leads us to lose the connection back to the basics. The further we get from the fundamentals of what we do and what we depend on, the riskier it gets in terms of our behavior and experience becoming detached from hard realities. Then that comes back to bite us in the ass because the real world is a harsh mistress and while we are free to ignore reality, we cannot escape the consequences of ignoring reality. Over time as that situation perpetuates both risk and impact increase, and the 'competency crisis' intensifies while we simultaneously become increasingly ignorant of/blind to the source of the problem. But it's fundamentally just this - A widening gap between reality and behavior.

You can see this in a LOT of areas although in tech it's very obvious - As we move away from the low-level fundamentals of computing such as interacting directly with hardware and the scope of education being able to take someone's knowledge right down to the atomic level, that lack of underlying knowledge comes to bite in several ways. One, there becomes a lower limit of someone's ability to understand how something operates and therefore troubleshoot problems with it. Two, advancement (individual and collective) deviates and breaks it's link with the underling fundamentals in ways that eventually lead to a breakdown in operating, in ways that are not predictable because they no longer sync up with the hard realities that underpin their operation.

Outside of tech, you can also see this in food production. Many people think complete nonsense about what 'sustainability' means in this context, simply because they do not have a link to the realities and complexities of the fundamentals.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

I think people are getting off track with the usual overused points like zoomer and boomer sperging.

There are two facets of the Competency Crisis:
* Individual level - The inability to pass skills forward on systems that are dependent on at least one person to know their inner workings. This issue isn't due to current year entirely, but decades of people passing the buck around because either the person in charge doesn't want to pass his skills (and thus his job security), and/or the management either doesn't understand or care about what will happen once he retires, and/or the cost of updating. The results of those are static decaying systems that people just live with until they collapse. A good example is Ubisoft/Bethesda/Creative Assembly games being the same shit engine because everyone who worked on it left.

* The organizational level - Relates to the laptop caste. American companies constantly downsize the actual working parts of their team while increasing middle managers (who's only task is creating more work). This results in skeleton crews who are constantly set to conflicting tasks by those managers, making them waste even more time and effort. Examples of those issues are planes falling out of the sky.

 

[Winsome Whimsical Waif]

• Boomers unable to use tech due to not being familiar with anything.
• Zoomers/Gen Alpha unable to use tech due to being iPad babies or something.

I have had both middle-aged coworkers AND high school aged coworkers impressed by my computer knowledge. The most pathetic example was when an 18 year old was impressed that I changed my desktop wallpaper.

 

[Trump's Chosen]

• AI is mostly used to automate tedious menial tasks that can free up time to do more important work.

Like always, better tools means it requires more competency, not less. Africa has difficulty maintaining and upgrading their equipment because there is a general lack of competency. AI means there is more room for really weird failures and it requires the people that operate them to be more skilled and more forward thinking.

People rag on Boomers, but besides Gen X it was still Boomers who developed much of the foundations of modern technology, and who have the most fundamental insight into how things work

Well yeah, they're the ones who didn't pass it on.

When you replace those populations with inferior stock you get failed states, because complex systems require a homogenous population capable of producing and supporting a cadre of experts that know how to keep those systems going, and how to improve them.

It's not just that. It also means there is more competition and less cooperation, and communication is harder across the different values between population groups.

 

[Meriasek]

There's a piece missing here, although I don't have a great name for it I guess you could call it 'Distance from fundamentals'.

I agree with this. Increased complexity and abstraction led to an increased distance from the basics. Hence Zoomers being very familiar with technology, but often don't really understand what's going on in there. Or many younger programmers being so used to shitloads of memory and pre-made code bites available that they don't really learn or care about efficiency. Leading to computers being ever more powerful, but not necessarily feeling faster or better, and shit like video games become ever more bloated.
And yeah, it's true for food production as well, and many other things. It leads to a tendency for animism in people if they don't understand the basics. Sort of believing that a computer has its own will since they don't understand what's going on in there. Zoomer rhymes with Boomer in many ways.
Except Boomers grew up with a lot more practical skills. I remember an old arts & crafts book for boys from my father's childhood. It had building steam engines from cans and crossbows and elaborate targets for that and glider planes from scratch. Although credit where credit is due, the Maker scene of today also does some fancy shit.

 

[Cougar Pump]

I agree with this. Increased complexity and abstraction led to an increased distance from the basics. Hence Zoomers being very familiar with technology, but often don't really understand what's going on in there. Or many younger programmers being so used to shitloads of memory and pre-made code bites available that they don't really learn or care about efficiency. Leading to computers being ever more powerful, but not necessarily feeling faster or better, and shit like video games become ever more bloated.
And yeah, it's true for food production as well, and many other things. It leads to a tendency for animism in people if they don't understand the basics. Sort of believing that a computer has its own will since they don't understand what's going on in there. Zoomer rhymes with Boomer in many ways.
Except Boomers grew up with a lot more practical skills. I remember an old arts & crafts book for boys from my father's childhood. It had building steam engines from cans and crossbows and elaborate targets for that and glider planes from scratch. Although credit where credit is due, the Maker scene of today also does some fancy shit.

Right, and you end up with cargo culting behaviors because the level of insight on cause and effect becomes severed at the point where someone is unable to go one level lower on the causality chain. 'What even is a filesystem' and soforth - This lack of understanding doesn't impact their ability to handle modern tech, so long as it continues to operate as expected, but the ability to fix when something does go off the rails is curtailed.

 

[Masturbator]

one of reasons why idiots are in charge of vital stuff lies within HR (unless management consists of devs or actually part of development team) you are going to run into a situation where a bozo with two years of some backwater college is judging should a guy with actual experience work there or not while having no idea about his profession or work details at all also ending up enabling monkeys who inflated their experience in resume to be instantly put in charge

this gets more entertaining on interviews because whenever applying there's barrage of questions that are not at all related with tech like "where do you see yourself in five years??????" like bitch what kind of answer you want to hear like that i am going to burn there half of a decade there or what

 

[oldTireWater]

I am incompetent as fuck.

However, I am not alone. Most people are only good at a couple narrow things. Usually those things aren't even very useful to other people. Still we manage because it often only takes one competent person to hide the weaknesses of many. Sometimes we get by because our opponents are even more amateurish. Many people think they're they smart one when they are, in fact, not.

If you think you're good at shit the people around you probably think otherwise. Confidence is not competence.

 

[Male Idiot]

Hr is definately part of the problem. All the posters had valid points, but I would like to add another autistix nugget to the growing pile.

Many systems are outdated. They were made by boomers, understood by boomers, and were never upgraded.

Japan still uses Fax machines for example.
There is an anecdote about US nuclear silos still having floppy disks.

There are upsides to this, but a weak point is that these systems will require new people educated in them, and imported Pajeet isn't one of these.

 

[Neodanthril]

something you didnt touch on that plays a part is that companies have totally outsourced employee training onto the education system, leading to credentialism gone wild. the demand has increased so much that, for a variety of reasons but including the one relevent to this thread, educational institutions have dropped the standards so low that a college degree is no longer an indication of intelligence as the average iq of the undegreed and the degreed is indistinguishible. at this point having a bachelors degree is equivalent to a high school diploma 60 years ago and masters degrees are now needed to stand out. a great example of this is my podunk community college requires masters degrees for student advisors. these people's entire job is to help students sign up for classes and they need a masters degree to do that? fucking ridiculous.

another problem not discussed by the op is quiet quitting. back in the before times when employers actually put their money into training employees they had an incentive to hold on to their investments and gave employees a reason to work hard at their job with things like benefits, pay raises, profit-based bonuses, etc. however, in our current times, or the post hart-cellar era, employees are disposable trash to be ground up and disposed of like the corpse of a medieval peasant who died of plauge. employees are starting to become aware of how little their employers value them and rightly have no interest or desire to do more than the absolute bare minimum to not get fired. naturally this leads to a decline in the quality of services or products rendered. i am reminded of an old soviet saying "they pretend to pay us so we pretend to work."

Companies love money. If they’re losing money because people aren’t performing, some “restructuring” is usually on the horizon.

thats not strictly true after a certian point. companies that are large enough, like coca cola, disney, or black rock, are simply too big to ever worry about financial aquisition and can instead focus on political issues that they favor. any financial shortages can be recouped by lobbying the government to intercede in their market to their benefit. this is known as "kicking out the ladder" and is simply an issue beyond fixing without radical and foundational changes to the entire government of the united states.