The part that they "end up in startups more often than you might expect" was a fascinating line for me and one that resonates with me quite well based on my experience.
I've often been shocked by how conservative an unprofitable/stagnant growth startups will be with engineering time. I've seen growing teams locked in incremental product/platform investment with no major new customer features in the roadmap.
I wondered where the conservatism came from given that at a business level the status quo was failure. This seems like a plausible explanation.
Yeah, I've been quite puzzled too, and figured perhaps they were anecdotal but perhaps they are not. I really like this definition of engineering process as "a decision making process (often iterative) in which the basic sciences, mathematics, and engineering sciences are applied to convert resources optimally to meet a stated objective" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering_design_process) and have met too many, by their unwillingness to commit and take ownership of a decision, pretty much stall the entire engineering development progress.
