I would argue that in fact you do need a critical mass of ego throughout the ranks of engineers in a large organization. An engineering culture where engineers

I would argue that in fact you do need a critical mass of ego throughout the ranks of engineers in a large organization. An engineering culture where engineers don't care inevitably leads to abdicating responsibility for overall system health and even data/workflow correctness as PMs attempt to steer the ship without understanding the implications of what they are asking for. Once this has gone on for a while, the system will be so intractably broken, and the dead sea effect will have caused such a brain drain of all those capable of fixing the problems, that at some point there's no economical path to restoring the software systems to a healthy and maintainable state. At that point you might as well just call in the private equity guys and figure out how to extract maximum cash out of the business as it stands, because any code change becomes more likely to break more things than it improves. So yeah you need ego. That said, it must also be tempered with the reality of needing to compromise enough to satisfice all stakeholders (including both technical and business stakeholders of all the different flavors). The beautiful thing about software engineering though, is there is a reasonable amount of objective facts, metrics and tradeoffs, that given a critical mass of sufficiently skilled and mature engineers, common ground tends not to be too hard to align on. Or at least, far easier than to get a non-technical stakeholder to understand the long-term implications of a bad decision.