I believe that the GP's point was that different roles have different tools in the box that are more efficient in their particular areas, and tend to rely on these rules even when solving problems in other areas.
It is very common to see engineers trying to solve non-engineering problems using the "technical ingenuity" to attempt resolving social issues; sometimes it works well enough (e.g. timezones), and sometimes it fails pretty miserably (e.g. OLPC).
Exactly, and I'd claim this is even true in their area as well. "Technical Ingenuity" is the obvious arsenal in an engineer's bag, and that's why it will bias engineers as the solution to all problems, even engineering problems.
For example, on a previous team we had an issue where configuration was littered in too many places. It was confusing, and people didn't know where to change what in order to onboard a new client, and they'd always forget something.
Well, most engineers went directly to re-architecting/refactoring as the solution. We should centralize all config in some new central config store, and have all systems pull their configuration from there. Once it's all in one place, it'll be clear what to change and we can't forget to change any.
One engineer though said, we just need a good wiki that clearly describes all the steps. Well, that took about 2 days, and it solved the problem. No technical ingenuity needed.
> Engineers have this lever of "technical ingenuity".
LMAO this is not merely a lever. This is why you hired engineers.