Are people bad at their jobs or are the jobs just bad?

I take some issue with the notion that we shouldn't blame the individual who does a bad job because of the system that incentivizes them to do a bad job.'

Let's say you have someone working a cash register. It is rare for a manager to check the amount of money in the register, and it's certainly too infrequent for them to be able to determine who took money from the register if any were missing. This is a system that encourages low paid employees to take money from the register - it's clearly in their personal best interest. As the store loses money to these issues, it's harder to pay a good wage to a large staff, so individual compensation is going to get worse, further incentivizing skimming.

On could obviously see the system has a flaw, and it could be fixed with more managerial effort. But at the same time the employees are just straight up stealing. They are actively choosing to do something which is clearly unethical simply because they can get away with it. Those upstanding individuals who do the right thing suffer the consequences - whether it be a less prosperous employer or a less trusting management - because of these selfish individuals.

Applying the same principle, those who intentionally do a bad job, such as throwing packages in the bushes or not putting in the effort to make sure a prescription is filled properly, are likewise acting unethically in their own self interest because they can get away with it. They are stealing time or energy instead of money, but in the grand scheme of things they are all mutually interchangeable.

I do think that better pay, better aligned incentives, and better training would all help, and the broader trend of enshittification is obvious. There is a price point below which quality is just not really viable, and those who want cheaper will get what they pay for. But treating those employees who are active participants in this system, the ones who agree to take the jobs for low pay and then cut corners to make up for it, as helpless victims of the system with no agency is intellectually stifling.

I have a similar tale. A semester before college ended, I got a professor who worked for a large company in the poultry business. I was one of the few people who was doing well in the Java 101 class and I was also going out of my way to help a few people struggling with it. Because of my tenacity, he decided to give me a short internship in IT.

Long story short, it didn't go well. I struggled to fit in, they threw me straight into the fire, and the people around me did not want to help. After 90 days, the manager called me into the office and told me I didn't make the cut. It was the first time I had been fired from a job and I felt terrible.

Looking back this was the lesson I learned. Things happen for a reason and sometimes, things that look bad are actually a blessing in disguise.

The company I was interning at had an awful culture where no one help anyone else. People were constantly getting fired and due to that there was a dog eat dog mentality there. The software was old stuff, SAP and other stuff like that. In retrospect, I'm really glad that I was fired; I dodged a major bullet.

I ended up finding another job quickly right after I graduated with an amazing company in a more amazing city.

IKEA in the US has a good fast-food restaurant as well (although I'd call it more of a cafeteria). On the other hand, in the US, IKEA doesn't value making it easy to navigate the store or developing a competent assembly service. I think the issue is that companies will generally either see something as a core competency, or at least central to brand identity, and therefore put more effort into it, or they'll see it as non-core, in which case it will go to the cheapest option.

You have misunderstood something here.

I (like a very large plurality, maybe even a majority, of devs) do not work for a consulting firm. There is no client.

I've done consulting work in the past, though. Any leader who does not take into account (at least to some degree) relative educational value of assignments when staffing projects is invariably a bad leader.

All work is training for a junior. In this context, the idea that you can't ethically train a junior "on a client's dime" is exactly equivalent to saying that you can't ever ethically staff juniors on a consulting project -- that's a ridiculous notion. The work is going to get done, but a junior obviously isn't going to be as fast as I am at any task.