[Draiken]

Yes these things happen, but in my experience it's about incentives set by the environment.

When short term gains outweigh long term gains, short sighted decisions will be favored.

When nobody really cares about quality, people ship sloppy code. See the broken window parable.

When rewards are given for shipping fast and not thinking about the whole picture, teams will ship without caring about other teams.

I acknowledge there are outliers that really do not give a f***, but those are rare. Personally I have yet to find a real "difficult engineer" in all my 15+ years in software. What I have found were dysfunctional organizations and managers that set the wrong incentives then fail to comprehend the ramifications.