Apologies it's not specifically engineers...it refers to "great minds", and is attributed Jeff Hammerbacher: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/747678-the-best-minds-of-my...)
Ah. I have a similar, if longer, itch about the tech brain drain, where we have taken people who might have been scientists, or physicians, or non-computing engineers and we have them doing any number of, at the space of five years or so things which are wasteful. We have brilliant people reporting to the mediocre and attempting to appease the foolish.