That's a very reductive and limiting view of what an engineer does. Someone that accepts requirements, and outputs artifacts. A senior/staff/principal engineer

That's a very reductive and limiting view of what an engineer does. Someone that accepts requirements, and outputs artifacts. A senior/staff/principal engineer should be aware of the customer needs they are working to solve, and focused on the problem. Their engineering skills are a tool to fixing it, not itself the result. In your example, * The industrial engineer should have asked "Do you need me to build car engine machinery?" And if they said no, pursued a different job. * Once on the job, if management said "let's start building car engines", he should have said "Why, how does this help our customers?" Actually, in your example: > However, once the new engineer started to work on chocolate line, they found it extremely boring and devoid of challenges. So they somehow convinced management that the chocolate factory needs to start producing car engines for their delivery trucks. That's borderline unethical. If you're bored and devoid of challenges. Change your job, don't ruin your company. You place the blame on managers and say "maybe management should listen to feedback from engineers", but that's exactly what happened in your scenario, and was the root cause of the problem! The manager listened to a poorly motivated, mis-incentivized, yet strangely persuasive engineer. The problem was that neither the managers nor the engineer actually thought about the customers, or listened to them. Incidentally, maybe they would have found out that the customers actually really like the chocolate but it always get delivered too late warm and melted, and so actually investing in building bespoke engines for their trucks would have been correct in that situation. But it has to start from the customer, not the prior skills of the engineer. Fix the process, and maybe neither the managers nor the engineer need to be fired.