There is plenty of evidence that I've seen firsthand in municipal government of unions protecting and promoting incompetent IT talent. It doesn't all fall to @#$& solely because government tech is often very slow to change, so mediocre workers can train on very specific applications and not need much continuing ed. I scarcely ever met one that would get hired at either a FAANG or a tech startup. I will qualify this by saying it's U.S. only. Maybe other countries handle this all much better, but we're dealing with Google U.S. in this story.