Marketing, sales, market testing, and doing what customers want are inherently messy processes. I think people who spend too much time immersed in purely technical work start to think that messy processes are inherently wrong, because there are no definitive right answers.
Probably the best thing to do would be, at the university level, to give engineers more business experience and marketing/sales types more concrete-problem experience. But that would be vocational, and I think universities systematically dislike seeing their work as vocational training.
Probably the best thing to do would be, at the university level, to give engineers more business experience and marketing/sales types more concrete-problem experience. But that would be vocational, and I think universities systematically dislike seeing their work as vocational training.