Curse of Competence

The curse of competence is the idea that in a company/project that all problems eventually gets label as a problem for the most competent person in the group.

A friend of mine drew the analogy that this is like favoring your good knee, when you have a bad one. Which often ends up with the good knee going bad.

As an example I was recently on a project where they had RF immunity issues. In this project this one chip was failing and locking up such the firmware could not talk to the chip. The firmware engineer knowing that I2C bus is known for these issues had put code in to try to reset bus, as well as even trying power cycle the chip. As it turns out these measures allowed the firmware to recover sometimes. However it did not always work. The reality of the situation was that the chip was bad or the circuit board did not have proper filtering on board. However since the hardware had so many problems the confidence in the hardware engineering team being able to fix the problem was low. Therefore the logical decision was that the firmware engineer knew this could be a problem and his fixed worked sometime, therefore he should fix it so the workaround worked 100% of the time. So it was deemed the firmware was bad as it could to not work when the hardware failed and needed to be fixed. The most competent person, the firmware engineer in this case, got the task to make firmware work properly when hardware failed. However the real question was if the hardware had problem with one chip, did it have more issues?

Like the good knee that gets more work because of the bad knee, the person with most competence gets more problems and work because they are competent.

The irony is that this cause most organizations to average down the competence of employees. That is eventually the competent engineers are over worked trying to fix everyone else's problem that they get burned out and leave. As a result eventually the organization averages competence down to their lowest employee, or they they are lucky they have constant turn over of the competent engineers.

Fixing this problem is often more a business decision than a management one. That is you can try to bring employees up in competence, however the reality is that competence creeps down to lowest acceptable level in a team, not up. Changing the acceptable level is business decision based on profits. If a company can profit with less competent engineers they will continue. Only when business profits and competence increase align does the competence increase.