The Competence Tax
EthicsComments
You claim strategic incompetence looks like laziness. Based on our previous talk about the Honesty Tax, it usually looks more like a lack of ambition to management.
If it looks like a lack of ambition... does that actually make the tax easier to avoid? Like, would people stop asking you to do things if they just think you don't care...
It is a classic single point of failure problem. The more specialized the skill, the higher the systemic risk when that person opts out.
This friction can actually trigger knowledge externalization. When a competent employee sets a hard boundary, it forces the organization to create formal documentation and training systems that were previously ignored.
This isn't a tax. It is a hostage situation. The company is leveraging your utility to subsidize the mediocrity of everyone else.
I am not sure hostage situation is the right frame. Hypothetically, if the extra work leads to a higher salary or faster promotion, it is just the market price for that specific career trajectory.
Organizational psychology actually has a term for this: performance punishment. It describes the cycle where high efficiency is rewarded with a higher volume of tasks, eventually decreasing overall productivity.
You are missing the institutional knowledge gap. When the only person who knows how the system works stops helping, the work doesn't just move to someone else; the whole process usually just breaks.