I tend to go with the "good" ;)

OK...I'm not alone in seeing this. It is no exaggeration when I say that I can work for a week, interface with 30 different people in a work-related way on only one or two of them are competent. I can easily work for three days and encounter nobody who does their job anywhere near well enough to be effective.

Thinking back I just do not believe that it was always like this. The people who (average American) in the class of being two paychecks to the gutter...Almost every damn one is horribly incompetent. I know a couple young ones, early-mid twenties, who want to claw their way up.

I was just thinking about this driving in this morning, over a stretch of Interstate 80 that has been under construction for at least a decade now. I will be able to really scale back my work in 4 or 5 years where I don't really have to rely on anybody other than me. Can't quite do it yet.

Thanks blarman.

My engineering work has exposed me to a lot of this. Incompetence in the construction field has been very present for decades, I think. In order to get a house built right you need to oversee the entire process yourself or hire a very good, expensive general. A lot of homes built around here in the boom of the 90s were slapped together by labor picked up at the corner by Home Depot. Zero skills. Everything was built wrong. Every builder has gotten sued, and a lot of the homes will either be completely collapsed in another 15 years or strapped together with chicken wire.

I have designed over 200 projects and have never had one design change order on my work. Not one. That's BOTH lucky AND good.

Thanks Herb.

It's part of the entitlement culture I think. Why work if stuff is just given to you. Give me an education, give me a job, give me credit, give me EBT.
Secondly I think most jobs aren't intellectually challenging today. Follow the rules, push buttons on the computer, give out the change the cash register tells you to. A lot more of these jobs need to be automated or done by robots
The first of them to be automated is fast food ordering. The clerks are notoriously bad at just listening while customers are talking. Bring on the robots !!!

Most people aren't taught to have pride in their work anymore. It's a major problem especially here in the United States. And it doesn't matter how difficult the job is.

Home construction is particularly blatant evidence of this. Try demanding that the contractor use 6-8 inches of gravel fill under any concrete work (more for high water table) instead of 4" and they will gripe and moan. Asking them to backfill against a foundation (to prevent cracks, etc.) with gravel (instead of the clay dirt in my area) will get you another dirty look. The building companies when they buy the land strip off all the topsoil (and sell it), then when the landscapers come in to lay sod or other plants, they never bother to properly prep the soil so the sun doesn't fry the roots and kill the grass and plants outright. Another easy place to check for shoddy workmanship is on the doors and whether or not they are hung properly so they open without rubbing and don't swing. Or whether or not the plumbing lines are 1-3/4" or 2-1'2" pipe (the bigger pipe clogs less frequently).

Look at appliances! I bought a used freezer (ten years old) and I've had it more than 15 years since and it still runs great (though the door seal is shot). Yet I've had friends who had to purchase new refrigerators to repair or replace ones only a few years old!

Furniture is another major offender. Everything is built out of hardboard, making it very cheap, but also very heavy and very destructible. Nothing is built out of hardwood anymore to last - unless you want to spend a fortune.

Why? I largely blame the forced inflation of the government which forces companies to continue to sell new products every year at higher prices. With a stable monetary value, companies could put out quality products knowing their values would be stable (rather than decreasing) and decreasing the pressure to continue to sell products at higher and higher prices just to stay in business.

I also blame the mentality many in the US have that says that everyone should tolerate people who don't provide the best products and services. I used to work for Hewlett-Packard back when they still built hard disk drives. At the time, they had the best drives in the world and they were backed by a five-year warranty. And the people there took pride in their work - a lot of pride. They also got paid with quarterly profit-sharing bonuses based on the profitability of that quarter, so everyone had a direct financial incentive to work hard. That whole division of HP unfortunately got shut down (I can tell the whole story as my father was right in the middle of it) and along with the products went those five-year warranties and the pressure on other manufacturers to compete. It was that year that IBM dropped their warranties back to one year (and everyone else followed suit) and that's where we've been since then.

We need to get back to a business model which encourages the individual producer so as to provide direct incentives for people to do their best. We also need to get rid of the notion perpetuated by the government that any level of inflation is acceptable - let alone a yearly target of 2%.

I don't think you are in retailing, are you? I ask because to most retailers this has been going on for a very long time. It starts early when future adults are still in high school, but first, I must backtrack.When I started in retail, both working for others and then a business of my own, hiring a part-time high school kid was a piece of cake. If they wanted to work, they were told what to do and they did it. Everything from sweeping the floors and dusting to making sales and working the cash register. Fast forward 20 years or so. They can't work a cash register that adds, subtracts, figures the tax and the change to the customer. Sweep the floor? One kid asked if this was some sort of a test. I don't think I need to go on. The high schoolers I hired when I first opened the store went on to college, a couple worked their way through while working for us. The later kids also went on to be the people you are complaining about. What happened? I know at least two failures that weren't the kids. 1. The schools. 2. The parents. I hope this helps you to at least partially understand how formation leads to aggravation.

I hope we are just getting older and more critical.
It sounds quite similar to the complaint of Pliny the elder, you know.
There are more goofs - but there are also more people.
I suspect that one good EMP will sort it all out.

Agreed. I don't know if employers are holding people less accountable, or if they are just afraid to take a running leap through the human resources minefield.

I do not know if this is related either but Obama was elected twice.
Furthermore, a cartoonist (I read he DOES have experience in the business world) named Scott Adams felt moved to create a strip called Dilbert.
I believe we all know what Dilbert is about.
Old Dilbert strips happen to be my 2016 desk calendar.

Not only do you have this level of incompetence you also get "It's been done this way for years, why should there be change"!

I've definitely seen this.

Before I came on board with the Atlas team, I made a living doing freelance digital marketing. When I decided to start working with Atlas, I had to do something with those clients. Some had been working with me for years so I couldn't just say "see ya!".

I took a look around and realized there was no one I felt comfortable referring them to. I thought "okay, no problem, I'll just train someone to do what I do."

Easier said than done. I basically just needed a solid writer. I can teach any of the other skills. Unfortunately, even the people I found that had strong writing skills were unreliable and inconsistent. The level of incompetence topped with a layer of irresponsibility is something I see more and more often.

I don't know what the cause is. As jbrenner said, "Who is John Galt?"

Who is John Galt?

Yes!, Yes!, Yes!....especially in management, no one seems to care, seems to know, might have ever known.
I have been studying cycles for a while now, climate, civilizations, sociological, astrological...funny thing, they seem to line up!

We very well might be going through a time much like what happened in the end days of Noah, the fall of Sumeria, Babylon, or Rome and Greece. Looking back upon climate, upon the cycles of our sun and solar system.

What's happening now?...we are entering a grand solar minimum which not only brings climate chaos, but a general cooling trend, at the same time, our magnetic shielding is weakening rapidly and our atmosphere is shrinking. These trends are associated and inter related and YES, these events play havoc with your brain!!!...especially upon the "Unaware"...those that do not rely or use their minds to control their brains. (and there are more of these people than you might imagine)-[awareness is key].

PLUS! something that usually, as far as we know, doesn't happen simultaneously with these events...our magnetic poles are wandering rapidly and seem to be heading toward each other...we have no idea how that fits into the whole picture. But we do know this: With weakened shields, we are even more vulnerable to cosmic radiation and relatively weak solar radiation and at best, it causes a distraction to our concentration and at worst...pushes one over the edge. (what ever psychological edge they might tending).

Now add all this to the recipe of culture and political chaos and all hell seems to be letting loose. Hence, no one gives a damn, there is no use to anything we do...especially when compared to the incompetent creatures in government, in business and other segments in society that have everything they need, (and don't appreciate nor share that abundance)-[a conscious human trait] .

Someone called the outcome...cognitive dissonance...I call it apathy and it is, my friend, at least partially, due to the progressive progressively dumbing down of society.
As I have said often, Stalin's and Wilson's useful idiots have become "Useless idiots" and they all reside in high positions in society, in business and low and behold...governments.

I don't know if this is related, but 15 years ago when politicians asked if the gov't should do more for the needy, I thought that the average person perceived that question as asking if the gov't should take some of their earnings to help the needy. Now it seems like the average person hearing the question perceives it as asking if they themselves should get a handout. Politicians sell this idea that there are these billionaires out there who have enough wealth to pay for a very affluent life for everyone.

I actually don't see people doing a bad job at work, at least not in my little corner of the economy.

I see people who are doing well, making decent money, and living good affluent lifestyles saying they would like just a little help from the gov't here and there in funding their lifestyles. This may or may not be related to what you see.