My money is on incompetence too, but it certainly could be malicious. For example, imagine a small company run by two frat brother entrepreneur guys. They bribe some factory supervisor in Taiwan for the designs to a product. They cant understand anything about it but they decide to tweak it to make it cheaper. Their greatly underpaid sole engineer discovers his girlfriend is cheating with the main entrepreneur guy. This is pretty disgusting because engineer man is a good guy and main guy has an underage girlfriend living in a plywood loft built inside a storage unit. One day engineer man says "fuck this I'm going to be a fucking farmer now". He modifies the designs to suck before grabbing a check from the middle of the stack in the printer and heads out the door. Six months later the factory in Taiwan wants the designs for the new product. Main guy digs around on the file system and finds the modified stuff. His new engineer just started and isnt really an engineer but rather an engineering student- he says he will "do the needful". Instead of looking over the designs new engineer plays rocket league and smokes weed. Another six months later engineer guy is growing organic carrots and heritage lambs with his new gf who has kind of fucked up feet and not great teeth but she's nice to him and is good at farm chores. At night he goes to read /r/girlsgoodatfarmchores and at some point sees a link to a video of a cable frying the shit out of the thing its plugged into. "Huh, I really ought to clean this shit out from under my fingernails" he thinks.