throwaway0625's comments

I am implying that. In the time since this story I've had a lot of time to think about the ethics of this situation. Even if he was a sleazy liar, sleazy liars are people too, and someone getting fired is drastic. But to use your terms, a multiplier on a negative quantity is more deeply negative. He was doing his job duties none at all or poorly. Other people had to clean up after his messes and lies. I created a throwaway account to tell this story because he was the most sociopathic IC I've seen in the business, and my career is not brief, I am not normally phased or automatically put off by sociopaths.

There can be plenty of reason not to trust a jury of co-workers.

Somebody I worked with was fired. He wasn't doing much work and seemed to devote most of his days to manipulating his image. He was not just "managing up", in fact if he were better at that maybe he could have survived longer. What he did especially well was molding perception of peers.

Maybe tops ~3 people working closest with him knew he was full of shit. But in very far breadths of the organizational tree, he spread the word that he was the guy to talk to on the team, pulling all the weight. If you asked most of his colleagues to this day, they would probably tell you he was a productive to high-performing contributor, which he was not.

I think this is actually how he got the job in the first place. He schmoozed far and wide in company X, then more productive employee lands a gig at company Y, where I worked, and he greased the wheels through social connection to also go there. I suspect he collected stock options at some pretty good places over the years doing this.