This is very true. Just look at Intel: people frequently complain that the company isn't "engineering-driven" any more, but back when I worked there, it was led by Craig Barrett, an engineer. It was a disaster: under him, they adopted the terrible P4 Netburst architecture that was married to the patented, proprietary, and very expensive RAMBUS memory. And that was just one of many terrible decisions in that era. Don't forget Itanic.