I think as an employer you need to know when you have such an engineer, though, or be prepared to lose them. I’d personally disagree with the cost effectivenes

I think as an employer you need to know when you have such an engineer, though, or be prepared to lose them. I’d personally disagree with the cost effectiveness argument though. Unless your engineering work really cannot benefit from more skill (and as often as I’ve heard management think their work is relatively simple, in practice I’ve rarely seen it) then you’d have to replace a highly skilled engineer with a small team that would likely cost more than $500k. Packing your engineering firepower into as few bodies as possible is a highly cost efficient strategy, as most of the successful techs know. On the other hand, a small team is less vulnerable to getting hit by a bus or hired out.