I've definitely seen some examples of over-technically focused engineers, but this piece goes too far to portray engineers as hapless sheep that need to be herded into a useful business purpose, lest they wander too far into an interesting technical problem and never return. Establishing problem requirements and definitions is something every engineer is trained to do and is really not such a difficult thing to do, but once that's done it's no longer the primary job focus.
As a software engineer and manager of software development teams, I disagree; very few software engineers in my experience are able to approach problems without injecting their desire to use shiny new toys, rewrite entire systems (simply because the existing code is unfamiliar to them), shoehorn patterns that are a poor fit, etc. it’s honestly a major problem in this young field in my opinion. I think the article outlines some good pointers to avoid these things and instead focus on building software products more purposefully.
