Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really wish I'd read this 25 years ago, but probably I wouldn't have believed any of it.
I don’t know, I’ve mostly followed this approach over my 20 year career, but it really depends on your surroundings, and honestly hasn’t led to great success. E.g. If you’re surrounded by yes men who will code whatever without question, product people greatly prefer that, and you end up sidelined. There’s also plenty of companies who don’t want engineers getting involved with decisions, and product and UX people work…
I'm amazed at how non-obvious this seems to most engineers and how often this angst gets repeated in online tech communities. I mean, when I was in academia there was a tension between publishing impactful results or cozying up with the right professors into the right conferences vs outputting meaningful work (pressures into p-hacking or having big names author suspicious results is par for the course.) In industry it's the tension between product folks and engineers. Have you ever talked to high-level finance folks who deal with the tension of product folks just wanting to do things and finance folks who remind them how money works?
It turns out that the hardest thing about getting things done with people is... dealing with people. I wish there was a way to remove this weird somewhat-ascetic blockage found in tech communities about this. Many of the more physical engineering occupations have to deal with this in the form of contractors and supervisors. Wait until you have to work on a government contract lol.
When I mentor junior engineers with these feelings, I like to use an adage: "Where there are people there are politics." Look at pretty much any prominent FOSS project and you'll see tons of it (by dint of transparency) and those folks generally focus on the project and not a product!