Lmao no it doesn't.
Your salary is simply the amount of money you have convinced a company to pay you. You could waste 3 years making 100k a year only to deliver a failed project that resulted in 0 revenue.
Your salary is simply the amount of money you have convinced a company to pay you. You could waste 3 years making 100k a year only to deliver a failed project that resulted in 0 revenue.
I think you took it to mean actual calculated dollar-value driven-by-the-eng worth. Even thinking about that, your example is wrong because it ignores expected value (EV) of a project which takes into account risk. For example, if your theoretical project has a 10% chance of generating $5mm/yr and a 90% of completely failing, the EV of the project is $500k/yr - so it's totally worth it to pay an eng $100k/yr to work on it, even if it fails.
Sure you can redefine "worth" to include scheming and taking undue credit and deflecting blame, but it's a stretch.
You must interpret "worth" in a tautological manner if you consider the toxic persons behavior valuable. It's an organizational pathology. Just because it happens doesn't mean it's good or teaches us we need to re-evaluate what we consider value.
Cancer can displace useful cells and kill the organism. It doesn't mean that "well in the end it was for the better anyway since cancer cells are more worthy since they ended up winning". That's twisted logic. Also note that megacorp won't die so easily and the effect of one such person may not show up visibly until after they've voluntarily left for a better job to another place to repeat the cycle.
1. that someone with what would be considered a morally/ethically negative skill would inevitably damage an organisation, or that an organisation would not want someone with that particular skill.
2. that the cancer analogy is at all useful. A company or org is not a body (it is a legal entity with a specific purpose), and a person with what I've called morally negative skills is not a cancer cell (they are a thinking person with actual goals that may align and actual skills that may be required).
I can pull out innumerable examples from politics or business here. Take the current US incumbent. Or, as I'm from the UK, the current prime minister, or his home secretary. Of course, to an observer who feels they are a cancer (I do!) they are what you describe. And they will always force other people out who would seem to have [call them] positive skills that would make them better suited [from my viewpoint], sure. But none of that means they aren't skilled, or that they do not have (fairly obvious, as I think about it) "worth"