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Engineers and technicians are a minority group. Your positive experience of that group doesn't necessarily invalidate Vonnegut's observation about people in general.

you don't know much about Kurt Vonnegut's background.

Individuals can be. Systems with bad rewards for doing so rarely are.

For a tech example, see how reliably Google rewards teams for making new stuff and not for keeping it running.

Counter example the hateful Microsoft seems to be able to keep stuff working for decades.

But ppl don't hate them for maintaining their old products.