Being nice does not - or at least should not - make up for being incompetent.

True story: I once worked for place that at one point hired a front-end engineer who didn't know JavaScript. Nice guy, generally. But from my POV had listening skills that led to friction (and crap output for clients).

I was never able to wrap my head around the fact that within out team was a front end engineer who had no experience with JS. I don't want to work with a-holes but my job / career shouldn't be tied to someone who can't swim.

I tend to agree here. I've been on teams where being too nice has lead to slipping deadlines and crippling miscommunication or more generally unmaintainable code that leads to dozens of bug tickets months down the line.

For real though, how on earth did that org hire a front-end dev who didn't know js?

Like they used to be a backend engineer before? In general I consider any software engineer worth there salt can pick up a new language and framework pretty quickly. And so I tend to ignore the technologies they know, but instead look for their fundamental and ability to learn quickly.

Maybe they did lots of front-end jobs outside the web stack?

God knows OpenGL ain't no joke.

Maybe. Good point. But that wasn't the case.

That's a good clarification, but to be honest, casually from a reader point of view, saying sufficiently good does seem to imply that skill is sufficient to get the job done, thus good enough for the job.

Which I mean, if you're good enough for the job, that would be a meet expectations review, which I'd say counts as "good".

So having said that, my experience is that people who aren't at least good enough to get the job done do eventually get fired or stop moving up the latter, even if they are super nice. At least in the software engineering field, don't know about business or management tracks.

Or, “incompetent” may be “sufficiently good” even in a healthy work environment where the company has a large enough profit margin.

One thing that seems to get missed by a lot of people, is that if your profit margins are 90%, that means you can screw up almost every order as long as marketing and sales can bring in enough customers.