A huge confounding factor for this discussion is the big-5 personality trait Agreeableness. It's essentially how people make tradeoffs between their own needs a

A huge confounding factor for this discussion is the big-5 personality trait Agreeableness. It's essentially how people make tradeoffs between their own needs and short-term interpersonal conflict. "Put the company first" is another way of getting at "Engineering managers need higher trait Agreeableness in order to succeed". It's not maximizing Agreeableness, just putting it at a higher level than individual contributors. And for good reason. The overall goal is to make smart tradeoffs and find win-wins. You've got yourself, your managers/executives, and your team. They each can get varying amounts of acclaim, compensation, and terms of employment (ie, hours worked). I kind of want to say that the company matters here, but it doesn't really. Well, at least not until you get to a large enough company scale that your reputation among people at the company starts to matter. Say ~100 people or so.