[sizzle]

You have a huge chip on your shoulder, geez. Your argument is missing some logic. The engineers at Google are building from UX design specs.

"if they don't know it they quickly learn it through seeing their users interact with their software."

Engineers don't do ethnographic research to avoid these problems in the first place. Why subject users to painful workflows when UX teams can solve these issues early on in the SDLC and save the dev teams from doing MORE work later on fixing these usability issues?