Things like 'experience' and 'qualification' seem to become more and more relative. Unless requirements are uniform, "qualifications" generally can be achieved in two ways - extensive and intensive training plus a certain dedication on part of the trainee OR by lowering requirements and artificially reducing the fail rate. Pretty much the same goes for ''experience" that is measured in hours/days/years. All depends on what person does most of this time. With advances in technology and increases in its reliabilty there must be pilots that would have thousands of hours and not a single malfunction just as there ARE people who never experienced things like a light bulb going off when they were alone and had to "deal' with it and there will be more people like that in the future.
In this context praising someone for obtaining "qualifications" or passing exam is premature unless you know what is required to qualify and what questions are asked at the exam.
It happens everywhere but it's very sad and definitely wrong that it seems to be happening in aviation. Human capital is the most expensive of all, this is where the costs always seem to grow and this is the one single area management ALWAYS look into when they want to increase the profit margins. I heard that aviation cannot be taken out of the context of the wider economy, but I think that it has to be. I suspect if regular economic enterprises were physically at the height of 10000 meters above the ground and keept there by the quality of the personel, the attitude to outsourcing scr*w-ups would be little bit different and the ratio of professionals knowing which buttons to press and WHY these buttons and not the others to office plankton only capable of pressing the learned combinations of buttons would be a bit higher.
The fact that both FO were "qualified" and type-rated yet there are number of things that they had never even been trained for speaks volumes. And its a huge regulator's failure that despite that they were allowed in the cockpit of a commercial passenger flight, and what's worse BOTH of them at the same time in the same cockpit. But unless this is strictly regulated to ther point of directly criminalising deviations it will be happening and will be happening more and more often. Nothing illegal after all, whereas it should be illegal just as its illegal to sell contaminated aviation fuel. And coming from corporate finance I know that generally companies will do as much (as little) as the regulation let them get away with. Humans in general do not often do more than is formally required.
And this is precisely the reason why I believe that Air France will be let off lightly considering that they just killed 228 people including their own staff. Unless regulation changes other big airlines might be tempted to follow their example. It's easier for them too - they are the ones that can afford the newer aircraft and better mainainance, so their estimated technology fail rate is lower and human factor doesn't play as big a role when everything works 100%.