zlacker

Depends why/how they left.

I have seen firing a great/respected/natural leader engineer result in pretty much the whole engineering team just up and leaving.

>>jpgvm+(OP)
No see, it doesn't matter, engineers are all cogs and easily replaceable. I'm sure they just dialed the engineer center and ordered a few replacements and they started 24 hours later and were doing just as good of a job the next day. /s

>>jpgvm+(OP)
Yes, that matches my experience as well, that's why I mentioned "individual contributors", maybe it wasn't clear.

It's different with engineering managers (or team leads, lead engineers, however you want to call it). When they leave, that's usually a bad sign.

Though also quite often when the engineering leaders leave, I think of it as a canary in the coal mine: they are closer to business, they deal more with business people, so they are the first to realize that "working with these people on these services is pointless, time to jump ship".