An example: "good" engineer thinks management are a bunch of idiots, leading him to constantly criticize and question decisions. This criticizing is done amongs

An example: "good" engineer thinks management are a bunch of idiots, leading him to constantly criticize and question decisions. This criticizing is done amongst the team, leading the entire team to question management and, therefore, the direction of the product. Now, instead of doing their best work, they are doing the minimum required to not get fired. I've seen this happen. The engineer sowing the poison was complaining that management wasn't hiring enough engineers, even though the product was "profitable". He never considered that the analysis had been done that the product would not be any more profitable by cranking out more features and would, in all likelihood, be less profitable. As a result, other engineers picked up on the meme and significantly reduced their efforts. After all, who is going to give their best efforts if management is just going to be stupid and waste it? So maybe 0.1x is a bit of an exaggeration, but I can live with that.