> If that quote attributed to Fred Jelineck ("Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recognizer goes up") is right, they should have negative linguists.
That's a really, really, really stupid quote that pushes the increasingly popular world view that experts only drag the world down on every subject.
Linguists' contribution is unrelated to performance, positive or negative. Performance is the job of computer scientists designing architecture and of skilled programmers doing smart implementations of architecture.
The performance would probably go up if the company fired all presidents/vice presidents/CFOs etc., too (giving implementors free reign, unconstrained by costs and schedules), but the company would probably go under.
Every specialist has their own role to play. Thinking that subject domain expertise is a negative is indefensible.