IT Hiring:  Cascade Failure

Those in organizations (government, business, media, etc.) doing the IT hiring — department heads or human resources / personnel departments — being IT incompetent, have no idea what is required for IT competency. At best, they hire based on certifications (or the applicant's word they have these), probably expired; see No IT Education: Certifications. At worst, they hire based only on diversity and/or political correctness; see IT Hiring: Trading IT Competence for Diversity and/or IT Hiring: Trading IT Competence for Political Correctness.

Every IT incompetent organization thinks they'll just quietly hire someone IT competent to make up for their deficiency, as does the organization or person they hire, right on down the line, all the way to hacker hell. For example, an IT incompetent government agency, knowing it's IT incompetent (but pretending otherwise to Congress), outsources to an IT incompetent business fraudulently claiming to be IT competent, but the business, knowing they are really IT incompetent, hires IT incompetent people fraudulently claiming to be IT competent. See IT Hiring: Government, Business, and Outsourcing and 9/11 Was Due to IT Incompetence.

In the end there is no one in the chain of command who is IT competent but everyone above the bottom may have been defrauded into thinking there is; the person at the bottom may think she must be IT competent if her superiors hired her.

Hiring the IT competent is made much harder by the fact that they don't want to work for the IT incompetent; it is frustrating and demoralizing. Further, often IT incompetents don't really want the IT competent to work for them because it is very threatening.

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