If we tallied up all technical projects in the Western world that failed, how many would be failing …

I actually agree with you but at the same time, being unkind in those situations is only going to hurt yourself. The reality of many workplaces is that the technical aspect as not the main focus. Appearances and politics run the show at most companies. You can either accept that and work with the system or engage counterproductively with your colleagues in a misguided attempt to force them into technical competence (never gonna happen). Eventually I want to find a place to work full of technically competent people. I thought I would find that in my current company because it was so competitive to get a job here. Let’s just say that was not the case. It think it can be very hard for employees to filter on this without knowing someone on the inside.

I don't know if kindness is the right word you have used here. HR is not kind. At the end of the day they don't care about you. But they speak to you nicely. Same for the government too I guess

Opposing view - most large scale projects fail because of political and financial reasons rather than technology. Even the bad tech decisions are usually downstream of politics. If you’re wanting to build a high speed rail line, space rocket or nuclear power plant; a propaganda specialist is probably going to be more useful than an engineer.

I think you could argue that long term lack of kindness at all levels of an organization leads to organizational technical incompetence. It creates hostile work environment where employees don't feel valued which leads to talent attrition. Yes, only valuing kindness with valuing technical competence is not ideal but so is the inverse. You want both.

> how many would be failing due to lack of kindness versus, say, straight-forwards incompetence? Kindness and incompetence are orthogonal. You can be kind and still give honest, direct feedback. And your feedback will probably be received better because of your kindness.

Actually the most dysfunctional engineering orgs I've worked in had unkind hardos in charge who would yell & scream at people. More of it was because they were poorly emotionally regulated than because they were right in whatever they were yelling or screaming about. Government projects stand apart because things like cost are balanced against the inherent jobs-creation objectives of funding them. Kindness doesn't mean to let incompetent people sit in roles they are incapable of indefinitely. That's more "niceness", using all sorts of HR speak about family/win together/blah blah blah while waiting until the budget cuts come to surprise fire people who were never performing in their role. Kindness is to give people feedback that helps them improve. It is sometimes a poorly socialized engineers impression that people simply do their jobs poorly on purpose. In reality it's a mix of skills a…

Ive also seen cases where business people truly don’t believe there is an underlying reality to a problem. They evaluate approaches and people purely from a sociability stand point. You make a good point about government, there are so many big problems including bad incentives about working hard, taking risks, etc, it’s hard for to see that as the main one.

The biggest problem with government organizations is that they're monopolies. The lack of competition means that (1) if the organization is dysfunctional, it won't be beaten by a better one, and (2) it has little incentive to improve.