Could this just be incompenence? I have seen this kind of code many years ago when external company was brought to sell us their implementation of CMS on some

Could this just be incompenence? I have seen this kind of code many years ago when external company was brought to sell us their implementation of CMS on some (even then) outdated Java/js-on-server-before-node-era platform. I was asked to do code review to chcek if their code can be integrated into our codebase. I was quite unexperienced at that point in time but enough so to notice that there was something off with the code. There was a lot js that looked almost like exercise in obfuscation. Things like doing join, append and split on array to do push - and it was not abstracted into function - this three operations were repeated all over the code. And then I met the programmer - it was ovious after few questions that he did not know what he was doing and his direct manager, who was also present, know nothing about programming (he was more od a business person as he himself proclaimed). It was as if this company hired the cheapes guy they could find, that on paper looked competent, give him task of implementing CMS, and only looked at results (the CMS actually worked), but no one ever checked the code that was hiding under (and the guy never worked with anyone else and never read any other code besides his!)