[mr_gibbins]

Of course, it depends on the context. As a casual chess player, it's fine that I don't really know what I'm doing, and that I'm apt to be roundly beaten 7 times out of 10. There are no consequences to being bad at chess, except for feeling a bit sad if I lose too many games in a row.

As a senior DBA, it is absolutely unacceptable if I do not know what I am doing. I look after software which runs a fairly important part of the machinery of government. There is not much tolerance for incompetence in my little niche, although granted that no-one dies if I get it wrong, the consequences for the end-consumers of my little bit of the world can be life-changing.

Same applies (in a more important sense than just DBA work) for e.g. paediatric heart surgeons, rail drivers, airline pilots, people whose incompetence can kill. Skill and professionalism are very much key, and cannot be hand-waved away with platitudes to make people feel better about their own inabilities.

[BarryMilo]

A valid point, I think the sentiment is more common in the development world because things change so fast you can't really master the entirety of even a very specific domain for very long.

However, it seems IT over time has grown to be (or aim to be) "incompetence proof". That is, even if you mess up, there should be mechanisms in place to prevent a catastrophe, so that at least two people must be majorly incompetent to create a disaster. I guess we call it redundancy.

Compare with medecine, if your doctor is bad you can die. And people frequently do. I tend to prefer our base assumption that everyone is incompetent, that way we're prepared when someone makes a mistake.