> What proportion of your colleagues do you think are wildly incompetent

30%, minimum. I was hired alongside a guy with a fantastic resume. He pushed zero lines of usable code in 4 months. When he left I purged about 20 files which were tests that were just completely commented out (but I guess those count for LOC according to github's crude measure). I would say that not only was he incompetent, he was worth negative (thankfully, nothing critical) - Maybe in order to cover his tracks? he had moved certain classes of tagged tests (e.g. skip, broken) to "ignore" status instead of 'yellow star'/red dot, I now, months after his departure, have a pr reverting those changes months after because I didn't notice he had done that. Thankfully it had not covered up any major defect in our codebase (someone could have left a corner case test as "broken" with the intent to fix it later and wound up forgetting to and sending it to prod).

But hey. Programming isn't that bad. In the physical sciences it was 60-70%.

> about 20 files which were tests that were just completely commented out

How was this not uncovered during code reviews?

That's a good question. I wasn't reviewing the code he pushed.

The problem is that it only takes one or two wildly incompetent people to completely disrupt the quality of the software. These are the kinds of developers who actively create bugs, usually by building (or copy/pasting) solutions that only work by accident, or who decrease the velocity of everyone around them by generating reams of overcomplicated and brittle code that is hard to test, hard to review and hard to maintain. It costs a lot of management time too, trying to find a way to get them to improve, or to build a solid case for letting them go.

I think the reason why every developer tends to have a story about these sorts of incompetent colleagues is not necessarily because 50% of their colleages are incompetent, but because even if just 2% (one person in the department) or 5% (one person in your larger project team) is incompetent, that can be enough to cause a seriously negative impact.

I should clarify I lifted the 99% stat from the linked wiki. I agree it seems high.

I’ll estimate zero to 10% wildly incompetent. Many of the folks who aren’t able to program find other ways to be useful: Testing, requirements, prod support, sys admin, config. It’s not even clear they couldn’t program, but maybe came to prefer the other work at some point.

What’s your wildly incompetent estimate?

The problem is the percentage of wildly incompetent applying for your job is a lot higher than the percentage of wildly incompetent overall.

absolutely. The incentives to train for the job search and then apply (and succeed at) a job with zero relevant competency, are quite high. And there are... geographies... which have a deserved reputation of being mills for those sorts of individuals, likely because the economic incentive is even stronger than the median, which I suspect is quite annoying for actually competent people that come from those geographies.

Didn’t mattkrause acknowledge as much in his comment?

> The job market, …, is undoubtedly enriched for them.

A few percent maybe, but not as high as 10 percent. It's also not just people who "can't" do it, but also those that aren't motivated or cooperative (for whatever reason).