Personally I think we (engineers) made this bed ourselves. I mean there are a few possibilities: one is that a CEO says their tech team is not so great. And of course behind that door lies Dilbert.

Another is that the CEO says nothing about the engineering team itself at all, and it's all product, product, product. On that path lies Apple, and I have heard many say (myself included) that we would not work somewhere where engineers are rarely seen and never heard. Although, obviously some smart people do.

And when CEOs give praise to the teams, they get flack like this.

So I mean, what do you want them to say? This is hacker culture; don't whine, submit a patch. If you think they are better ideas, go work at DilbertCorp, or for Apple. Or, if you think there is some other path, describe for us what it is. Or better yet, go start a company that behaves that way.

But the way I see it, CEOs like this are just following principles that we ourselves have asked for: we want to be taken seriously, we want to make decisions, we want to sit at the executive table, we want to be perceived as an integral role that uniquely contributes to the success of the venture. Saying "our tech team is really great" is a direct consequence of those principles.