[gregjor]

I may have read too much into the question, but variations of this come up fairly often in HN and other programmer-oriented forums. Sometimes management and business people don't know what they're talking about and say the wrong thing and mismanage teams. In my experience it just as often happens that programmers (or engineers if you prefer) create a bubble and isolate themselves from the rest of the business, then get upset when they aren't asked to participate or management tells them to do things they don't want to do.

Businesses pay for programming teams to add value to the business, deliver products, make money. Sometimes business decisions don't align with what programmers perceive as the best course. And sometimes programming teams make decisions on their own that have costs and consequences that they didn't foresee or explain to the rest of the company. Cuts both ways, in other words, and for most companies software development is just one of the moving parts.