Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we need to address the underlying causes of people outsourcing their thinking like that. And a big contribution is “move fast.” No one has time to read, process, and think, because The Powers That Be (capital) want their results now.
With the exception of _one_ company that I worked at, pretty much every[0] company was a struggle between engineering and management. Engineering wants to get the software correct, and management wants to fire-hose features into the market. Most of the time (so more than half, at least), management tends to have a compulsion to mindlessly imitate what other companies/competitors are doing, usually without prioritizat…
While it can overheat and become problematic if taken to extremes, I've become convinced that this kind of tension is healthy in the prioritization process, and that you need a healthy equilibrium between engineering and product/management concerns.
Thinking about the possibility that there are orgs which sidestep this and still succeed is interesting.