[everforward]

I've worked places like that, and the issues are really threefold:

1) There is often a substantial depth of knowledge missing. E.g. it's not that they don't know how chmod works, it's that they don't understand conceptual models of filesystem permissions and the implications of having overly broad permissions.

2) The problem is often pervasive, where it isn't a single person that doesn't understand, it's a substantial (but non-majority) portion of the workforce.

3) Employees often only stay in their role for a year or two, creating a revolving door of people who don't understand X or Y.

> Can they do the job they were hired for?

It often depends on your definition of "doing the job". "chmod -R 777" will fix whatever issue is blocking the code from working, but is bad. And then someone else will use those permissions to build on top of that application, and it can spiral into a situation where it's incredibly hard to fix the bad permissions because of an unclear web of dependencies.

The app works, but the architecture is fubar.