An excellent essay on the decline of competence: Sultan Knish: Government is Magic
The essay is worth reading in full, along with the additional related points and examples in the comments, but this part sticks out for me:
Competence is built on the unhappy understanding that things won’t work because you want them to, they won’t work if you go through the motions, they will only work if you understand how a thing works and then make it work by building it, by testing it and by expecting failure every step of the way and wrestling with the problem until you get it right.
Is this not one of the core principles of engineering? Good engineering is not defined by how positive and nurturing your work environment is, or how diverse your team/organization is, or whether you’re compliant with the latest revision of some ISO or CMMI standard, it’s defined by whether the product of that engineering performs or fails at its intended task.