I'd go farther and admit something about myself, which I suspect is common: sometimes I'm in group A and sometimes I'm in group B. This is directly related to w

I'd go farther and admit something about myself, which I suspect is common: sometimes I'm in group A and sometimes I'm in group B. This is directly related to whether I'm working on something I consider valuable. In other words, if you can't motivate me to care about your product, I just want to turn cranks. A paycheck isn't enough to ensure full commitment from any employee, not just engineers. You have to actually manage people, meaning that you have to provide direction and leadership (read "incentives"). I still believe that people will give you a lot more than they'll let you take, if they actually feel as if a project's success will be reflected as their success. People who are willing to give will act autonomously and take responsibility, because "getting it right" personally matters. They have skin in the game. But things like artificial deadlines (i.e. no business consequence, but some exec gets an attaboy) and uninspired/unethical feature work (supported by HR-phony excitement) create an environment where "taking responsibility" gets reduced to "unpaid overtime and fake excitement". In that case, yeah, you need to chew the cud for me, because what you're actually paying for is just the swallowing.