That's more of a failure of leadership. If the engineers are in the galley rowing, they can all be great contributors to the forward motion of the boat, but it

That's more of a failure of leadership. If the engineers are in the galley rowing, they can all be great contributors to the forward motion of the boat, but it may still crash into rocks nonetheless. You can redeploy "deadweight" engineers who are good engineers but the project fails for business/political/leadership reasons. You can't redeploy actual deadweight engineers who don't contribute anything on an individual basis(or rather, you can, but you wouldn't want to).