I've seen several engineers who make more work for other people to fix than they contribute in progress themselves. Sometimes it is by bikeshedding on code reviews, other times by choosing some pet architecture/technology for a project which everyone else has to waste time learning about and/or migrating to, or by putting something in that bottlenecks all development of a critical codebase through only them, leading to people getting constantly blocked. Then again, these have been great lessons for me in what not to do, and what to recognize as red flags.

yes, they make more work for other people to fix than they contribute, but they don't make more work to fix than the people who are making work that fixes are doing. There is no -10x engineer, hardly even any -1x engineer - probably the worst you find are -.5 engineers.

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.

I saw -10x: they chose some crazy architecture for something then dug their heels in. The two people who historically got all the work done, both about 5x, decided to quit because of this. So now the work still needed to be done, in the crazy architecture, without the two best engineers, and on top of that time needed to be spent on hiring. Go forward a year and the progress the company made was probably less than it would have in a month before the fancy new architecture was introduced, and the loss of talent.

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.

Any bad engineer in a position of architect or similar can easily destroy the efficiency of a full team. Hell, of the whole company.

It's also filled with many more startups that lost $20M, mostly in engineer wages, and died unsung deaths.

Bad engineers do bring negative productivity to a team. Hard to say how common they are.

Implying that those startups failed due to engineer negligence and not due to strategic business blunders.

My main point was completely different:

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.

I didn't mean to imply that at all.

Though of course that is sometimes a factor.