Incompetent coworker, convinced of his effectiveness, leaves to start competing business: 'He's potentially mishandling client funds by mishandling their accounting'

The problem with competence, general intelligence, and understanding of something is that you'll generally also have an idea of the limitations of that understanding and your ability to comprehend.

Whereas the willfully incompetent and running a few cylinders short will have no idea how shallow their perception is, oblivious to the depths of the ocean that they're wading into—mistaking it instead for a pond whose bottom lies within their reach. This is the basis of the "Dunning-Kruger effect," a cognitive bias in which those with low competence have a tendency to overestimate their abilities in that area.

But as a bonus result, the incompetent are, and come across as a whole lot more confident, which has an amazing psychological effect on employers and the like who assume that these confident incompetents must really know what they're doing, meaning that as a result they end up in offices above their station.

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