[dagw]

Lots of people with engineering degrees and backgrounds hold very senior positions at large companies and happily make short term, profit driven, decisions every day. Unless you want to play a game of "no TRUE engineer" I don't think it would make a huge difference.

[hermitcrab]

The UK is full of stuff, built by Victorian engineers. Quite a lot of it is still working. Some of it is quite beautiful. I doubt anything built by private equity backed companies will still be working in 100 years.

[shiroiushi]

This is very true. Just look at Intel: people frequently complain that the company isn't "engineering-driven" any more, but back when I worked there, it was led by Craig Barrett, an engineer. It was a disaster: under him, they adopted the terrible P4 Netburst architecture that was married to the patented, proprietary, and very expensive RAMBUS memory. And that was just one of many terrible decisions in that era. Don't forget Itanic.