And a bad engineer can destroy as much.
One fun thing about humans is that almost all think they're underpaid. This says a lot about people and nothing about wages.
One fun thing about humans is that almost all think they're underpaid. This says a lot about people and nothing about wages.
Bad engineers do bring negative productivity to a team. Hard to say how common they are.
Though of course that is sometimes a factor.
You can't claim engineers are exploited because some cherry picked tech companies make huge profits. You have to look at the tech sector as a whole, including the parts that lost untold billions while the famous ones raked them in.
In fact I knew a guy whose effect on a project was to wipe out several years of progress but to be fair he was not a -.5 engineer, in some ways it was just the bad chance that led to him having such a detrimental effect, in another scenario he might very well have been a +2 or more engineer.
Additionally I've seen managers/HR demotivate a team of 5 so thoroughly that nobody got work done for 2 weeks. That is -5x from a single meeting.
Often claimed, rarely proven. Usually in those cases it's actually management doing the value-destroying, by either misallocating people or refusing to act on removing bad engineers.
I feel like I've put good quality engineering work, in to projects that were completely wrong-headed in the bigger picture, and thereby lost the company money.
In the particular situation I was thinking about above, it actually could've been better from a business perspective had I not been as "good" of an engineer. I took over a project that was simply not working at a technical level - it was a DSP-based thing, and the chosen DSP appeared not to have enough oomph. I managed to optimise the electronics and firmware enough to make it go, so it went on to production and AFAIK (I'm no longer at that company) has been a money pit ever since. The other possibility was a redesign with a burlier DSP, but I'd bet that the project would've been cancelled instead.