In my experience, engineers are mostly told “make this” and denied the opportunity to exercise broader strategy decision making skills.

It’s “don’t worry your pretty little head”, “we need you spending time on this, not wasting it on that”, “you don’t have all the information”, “the best way to help is to be heads-down programming and let us do our job of strategy”.

All ways to keep you in your place. Fast forward ten years, and is it really surprising that a perfectly capable engineer wouldn’t succeed on the first shot?

Funny thing, give him six months of practice (often the current strategy people had far more) and surprise, he’s perfectly competent!