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Age aside, I feel uncomfortable about anyone new (even experienced COBOL programmers) being able to make changes in these systems, especially given their approach has been portrayed as broadly antagonistic to existing engineers and staff.
From the article, the closest thing they have to an evidence is a search query. Rest of it is pure speculation since none of the people who reached out to author has any kind of visibility into what is going on.
> How do you judge competence of someone whose job and responsibilities are not known?
It's actually very easy to judge, based on the fact that someone who has never done an audit before is now trusted to do one.
I mean, I wouldn't trust Einstein himself at age 24 to audit a small business, no way am I going to think that some rando, maybe brighter than average, will know what they are doing when performing an audit at age 24.
I also think that, if the story is true, the fact that they started at the wrong end of the financials is a dead giveaway that they do not know what they are doing.
IOW, if I saw someone tasked with designing a new car, and they started by opening up MS Paint and drawing tread patterns for the spare wheel, I'd certainly consider them unable to design a new car.
Even if we err on the side of benefit of doubt, even the smartest 24yo in the world is not going to be competent at doing even a basic audit when:
1. This is the first audit that they are doing, and 2. They have never before had any accounting background.
So, yeah, it's quite reasonable to consider them incompetent that the chosen task in the circumstances.