I never understand these types that are smart enough to crash an entire company, but too stupid to make it look like someone else did it.
"You only hear about the ones that get caught"
No need to sabotage the company immediately, revenge is a dish best served cold.
I mean, it is theoretically possible there were two disgruntled employees, and second one pinned his crimes to the first one, but I think this is pretty unlikely, given the observeed lack of common sense.
I'm not naive enough to think there was a "golden age," when everyone was happy-dappy, but I think it's much worse, now, than it has ever been.
I mean, in order to do big, complicated things, you need teams, and teams need to work together. That means much more than just the "hard" skills of individual intelligence, creativity, and discipline. It's also all the "soft" skills, that help the team to retain cohesion, like mutual respect, loyalty, integrity, etc.
The problem is that the example needs to start from the top, and there hasn't been much of a good example, up there, recently.
It's not difficult to imagine people feeling justified in doing bad things to their team, like deliberately writing shoddy code, taking credit for colleagues' work, bailing out, before their bugs come to the surface, or throwing their teammates under the bus.
I always tried to foster a team that had mutual respect, and could focus on common goals, even when everyone had their own motivations and priorities. In my case, it worked, but I know that I was lucky.
At some point, some US employers would hire armed private security companies like Pinkerton to break strikes, often leading to multiple deaths.
In other countries, the army would be sent to break prolonged strikes by shooting at strikers.
In other words, it has been way worse.
This happened in West Virginia as well: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
Those conflicts (and there was a more recent one, in UK, during the 1980s), are with folks that have difficult, low-skill, low-pay, blue-collar jobs that can be filled by many people.
I doubt that you could find similar stuff about high-skill, highly-paid employees, such as engineers. I think that, even in the days when cavalry was being used against striking miners, the white-collar workers were being treated fairly well.
Maybe it has been worse for them, but I’m not so sure.
Not that one couldn't make it very hard to tell, but even circumstantial evidence in the hands of a good prosecutor can deliver a conviction.