[danjac]

As Kaplan-Moss pointed out in the original article, "incompetent" depends on the context and circumstances, and you may be able to remedy these in order to turn an incompetent employee into a competent one.

To take a very straw-mannish example, suppose you hired a Python developer but due to some admin fuckup they were added to the Android team. The easiest remedy is to move them to the Python team. The second easiest is to ask if they are interested in learning Android, and if so give them the time and support to get up to speed. The worst option here is to just fire them: you lose a potentially valuable employee you spent time and money bringing on board, possibly damage their career as a result, and hurt team morale overall.