I have something of an outsider view of this, as Capt. Kirk only had very senior engineers, and ones who were officers on a ship and not IC's. Maybe some CEOs a

I have something of an outsider view of this, as Capt. Kirk only had very senior engineers, and ones who were officers on a ship and not IC's. Maybe some CEOs are old enough to have learned from Capt. Kirk, but most engineering managers I've met in previous roles appear to have learned from watching Game of Thrones. The difference between an officer and a regular engineer is that an officer accepts orders and both responsibility and accountability for executing them. The captain saying "fix it" isn't a personal request, it's that for this body to prevail, you get this done. His decision is, "can I wait for my engineers to fix this problem so we can use warp to leave, or do I have to pre-emptively destroy this unknown ship to avoid everyone being captured, interrogated, tortured, and killed?" The analogy to software is quite weak. An engineering manager is not a captain. I have had to manage teams through "do or die" deals, where we needed a feature on a deadline to show we had the capability, or we lose the sale and the CEO gets embarassed in front of his board for losing a marquee client that was handed to him and that would have closed their next funding round. Engineering managers are not like officers in a hierarchy, they are political operators like everyone else in a corp. Their calculus is, "whose ass is this if we don't make this deadline, and if it's not mine, how do I use this need as leverage to extract other concessions from said ass-owner for my commitment?" The most valuable asset to an engineering manager is a perpetually frustrated engineer who always has a very complex reason something isn't going to work, as they become a black box of risk and uncertainty the manager can use as leverage in those discussions with their counterparts. "My frustrated loose canon genius who will demoralize your team if you cross him? He says it's impossible, but maybe there is a compromise..." I don't think it's reasonable to hold engineering managers to the standards of idealized starship officers. There would be no survivors.