is incompetence immoral?

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I'm on a job currently where I'm designing a huge piece of animation for a production company, and the technical director and the CEO kept telling me that whatever I drew up was fine with them, if the client liked it.
Now we're a few months into production, with only two months left, and it turned out they have no clue.
And I'm quite angry.
But the client won't be able to tell, probably, and the company will get away with it and everyone will get paid a decent amount and it'll be fine, except that it won't be good.
Far from what could have been done with the budget. It will look roughly like the designs, but there's no time whatsoever to tweak it. It'll be a first draft. At best, it'll just be okay, when it could have been a little gem.

And I'm wondering why I'm so angry at the production company.
I feel like they're bad people for not doing their job well, not even as well as they could. They're lazy and don't seem to enjoy their work, but they're also so incompetent they don't even see why I think they're doing a poor job (of course I told them of course, the atmosphere is a little tense) . For them, this is normal and how jobs go down.

And here I find myself thinking about whether I equate competence with morality, or at least, incompetence with immorality.

Anyone else share this sentiment?
Is that what being a nerd really means?

Is it immoral? It depends on whether it's a genuine one-off or whether this is standard operating procedure.


So to open up a window into my life for the last few years:

Land at a new job were I have visual basic experience in Excel and Access. First few months I was told I'd be learning C#/.Net Core through Pluralsight (fine) and that I'd also be throwing in Angular 2 to figure out a way to link the two together in joint projects (these days it's easy - this was summer of 2017 - early going and what was out was still relatively buggy both with Angular and .Net Core). I ended up making an app for a mom and pop finance company - took a bit, found out our third party provider for grids was rather patchy and there were all kinds of holes in their product like not being able to sort grids when the value columns were based on foreign keys - offputting but okay.

By February 2018 I was thrown off the deep end. A project 10x that size, needed engineering math, at least a couple dozen things that my boss and coworkers had never done in Angular (technically I was and still am the only one who knows it), and the client wanted the moon on the stick - yesterday - and I had to simultaneously 'fake it to make it' while meeting deadlines that would have had me sweating bullets even if I'd had years of experience. Over time it got dragged on, they saw enough by the end of the summer to be pleased, I'm still debating whether it was summer of 2018 or winter of early 2019 that was the worst months of my life. Early winter of 2019 was when the project finally got sandboxed, after the client had made a complete disco floor of the UI with all kinds of byzantine logic hook-backs and loops to automate just about everything in the user interface and the info for the finance portion of the program was incredibly vague - I had to pull teeth to get what they needed and even then I had to make it up as I went, put a lot of hours in, cross my fingers, and hope I wouldn't have to pull it all apart again. That winter I was up to 60mg of Nexium, worst heartburn of my life and I actually had to fast and go on liquid diet at several points because it got that bad - while, just like most of the period from April 2018 thru Jan 2019 I was working 60 - 70 hr weeks for 40 hr pay and half the time burning right through my weekends for the sake of my own survival.

The next project we got, I don't want to go into too many details but lets just say another mom and pop, accounting app this time, first time to reinvent the logic, and although the time tables were awful for the first project they at least got spreadsheets. This time my boss again promised 4 to 6 months, I took one look at what they were talking about and I knew it was at least double that, then we spent at least three or four months of that just pulling teeth trying to get information out of them just to get started. Now that I'm, again pretty much by myself, maybe 60% done with this and after they switched the job up, after signing the quote, from their original system to a new sub-in system that took what I was building for them from something mid-sized to something closer to enterprise (like full Quickbooks editability) they've been sweating us about having it done by the end of the winter, my coworkers broke it to my boss that we're going to need to ask for an extension, from what they've been so far about pretty much any requests it sounds like the answer is going to be no.

So I've noticed a few trends:

Many mom and pop shops, if they aren't narcissists they're used to things being cutthroat and they often run things in a rather Machiavellian manner when dealing with vendors. Even the first big project where they wanted everything, they took the original project and expand it to something like 150 - 200% of the original scope and did so by dimensions that the language of our contract wasn't able to push into a phase 2. This current customer - the best way I can describe them is they remind me of the types of people who'd run a pawn shop, have customers who are constantly defaulting on their payments, and my guess is maybe one in ten of their customers has a credit score above 700, maybe 3 out of 10 above 600, so they're a bit fried around the edges and looking for almost any tell-tale signs that anyone doesn't have it together (which made me that much more pleased when my boss and coworker lied to them about how long it would take).

The other thing - there are a lot of people who are oriented not in the usual sense you'd be used to thinking of another human being, rather they're bonus maximizers. Everything, including language use - AND incompetence, are tools to maximize leverage over the people around them. I think that group is where you need to be incredibly careful because while most people, one would think, do their best not to appear incompetent and want to show that they know what they're doing - it's a completely different mindset, ie. incompetence as a way to take people out to the deep end, keep them back pedaling, and you can make irrational demands, keep it within the margins of an honest mistake, and it just takes being the kind of person who's willing to be that vicious to win the race and smash the person whose trying to be honest and forthright.

So yes - if incompetence is a tool in the employment of game theory it's immoral. If it's used for insurance fraud (like leaving an open can of kerosene next to the wall outlet and the house burns down - oops!) - it's immoral. The thing that makes me sick though, if the people at my work really have to lie to the customers about project times to get their foot in the door and then somehow over-deliver, late and for free - late, to make it all okay - that's a really bad sign of where things are at. When I used to audit I noticed that we were recovering money for thieves from thieves and you could tell by watching mom and pop vendor's invoices in accounts payable going out 8 to 12 months late! Seems like that culture is just pervasive here - ie. mullets, cocaine, Def Leppard, and the kinds of boomer optimism that everyone down the hierarchy pays for as they try bridging the differences between 3rd rate new thought and Napoleon Hill with the unforgiving of physics, programming logic, or whatever else that simply can't be brow-beat into working.

I never thought I'd be a deep, genuine misanthrope but I hit at least a few points where it really registered that a great many people, not all but a horrifically high percent, are incredibly close to being apes who just want to rape and kill each other by legal means. It normally doesn't come out in words but it comes out in just about every observable action and not just blatant disregard but a weaponized form of it, a bit like negligence planted to trip other people up combined with absolutely terrible communication - and this goes for a lot of our clients, in day to day requests if they need something done they'll give you maybe 30% of the information you need and if you don't push back you'll spend twice as long as the task would have taken just to try and assemble the context of what they're after.

Objectively, it all depends. It's immoral, for example, when you give someone your word and you fail to deliver on your promise. Simply being incompetent on its own isn't immoral because everyone is incompetent at something.

I'm a musician. I show up to teach kids how to play musical instruments, accompany Catholic masses at the school every Wednesday, lead the blue haired crowd in a couple of their favorite church songs every Wednesday at noon, accompany choir practice, do the whole Sunday morning church thing, and besides that I even have solo gigs of my own where people count on me to know what I'm doing. Being me is complicated. If I don't perform and meet or exceed expectations, I lose gigs or get fired.

I always wanted to be a fighter pilot, though. Or an astronaut. Guess what? I'm myopic. And I'm bad at math. And even if I could see and was good at math, I really have no clue how to identify friendly versus hostile aircraft just on sight. So even if I ever made it into the cockpit of a F-18, it's only a matter of time before I do something stupid, stall out, put the machine in a flat spin, and destroy millions of dollars of taxpayer money, possibly killing myself and someone else in the process. Putting me in a fighter plane is just a bad idea.

Admitting you're incompetent, well...there's no shame in that. None at all. Because you accept the fact there are things you just can't do. What would be immoral would be if you attempted those things despite knowing your own incompetence. You have to look at things objectively. When in doubt, don't! That's the kind of advice that saves lives.

Incompetence can also be cured. As a musician, there are upper limits to my ability. I may not really know all there is to music, or I may not possess ALL skills right away. But I've had enough practice to know how to develop skills I'm lacking in. I also know how to do musicological research. I'm deeply interested in computer music and have started learning Python to assist with that. I saw a cute TikTok where they showed coding in film versus coding in reality where the guy is working in his IDE, gets an error message, and then says "Aw, f***k it" and starts googling whatever it is he's trying to do. Well, that's me!! ! So what I do is write Python code to accomplish simple but repetitive musical tasks anywhere from quickly making chord charts in Finale to automating a synth pad performance in this orchestra I play clarinet in and double on synth. I'd eventually like to move into machine learning and build a machine that will automatically improvise an organ part based on my piano playing. That's going to require accumulating a sh!t-ton of data over a long period of time, not to mention I have NO IDEA what I'm doing! But if I work slowly, starting with just the automation I'm working with at the moment and expanding that skill set, eventually I know I can build a machine that will do exactly what I envision. And sometimes I get called on to perform music that's too difficult for me to do. So I practice, make notes, study scores, listen to YouTube examples, do metronome drills, etc., until a good performance is within my grasp.

That kind of incompetence is curable. My incompetence to fly a F-18, I'm afraid, is not curable. It would be immoral to promise to deliver on things I can't possible deliver on. It would be immoral to take a wedding gig which will involve difficult music and then just flat not practice. It would be immoral to represent myself as a Python expert when I have to spend hours on YouTube and StackOverflow just to figure out simple concepts. Weighing what you CAN actually do against your word is an objective measure of morality in relation to competence. I believe it is something that should be taken very seriously.

I surely doubt competence or incompetence exists in any moral context.Well intentioned failure is the definition of incompetence,so it can't be immoral.Immoral failure would be iresponsability not incompetence.

The immortal part is receiving cash for incompetent services

Nobody is competent at everything.

Nor should they have to be

Competence has nothing to do with morality

Is incompetence intentional? If not it's hard to insist it's immoral. People don't really choose to not be skilled or capable.

Is this a matter of incompetence or of deception?

If you say you’re a surgeon when you aren’t, and someone dies as a result, that is manslaughter. If you get lucky and they live then you’ve still committed a crime. But if you’re just no good at surgery and don’t say you’re a surgeon then you haven’t done anything wrong.

If your employers have said “we’ll produce a product to this standard in this time” and they do it, then I don’t think they’re being immoral, even if they could have done better, or if the customer could have got better value elsewhere.

Keeping an incompetent person in a job vital for, say, national security, is immoral

Incompetence, in and of itself, is not immoral.

But encouraging it is immoral, and knowingly keeping an incompetent person in positions of authority and of vital importance is immoral.

When the incompetence is glaring, even an ignoramus shouldn’t be given a pass for knowingly keeping an incompetent person in a position of vital importance.