[andrew_]

This reads to me as an incredibly reductive take on a real-world problem, offloading blame/responsibility to engineers to properly frame something which very few engineers fully comprehend or can intelligently convey. I understand the author is trying to teach how to frame it, but it still requires experience and skill that I've seen very little of during my career in all but the most experienced or talented engineers.

Alternatively, in companies where there are Product Managers or Engineering managers, those folks should be skilled at parsing, translating, and conveying the technical issues to management and stakeholders in financial terms they'll understand.

"We" the engineers don't sound like idiots - "we're" being literal, which is all "our" job typically requires of us. I see this as a failure of leadership rather than an individual-contributor problem.