I have one big glaring early disagreement: Every engineer is at least a little bit techno-utopian.
If you mean they think the future can be made better with technology in the abstract, sure. But I think some, maybe many, engineers think that the current way technology is being developed and deployed is leading towards dystopian futures, not utopian ones. They may tell themselves that the cool problem they are solving would be solved by someone else, and they get money and a good puzzle. They may tell themselves that it's not their work. They may admit that is the future and say they just want to be in an excellent position in the dystopia. But if you look at the efforts put forth by open-source advocates to fight against closed-source, or the work that goes into blocking ads and tracking, or the way that misinformation propagates over the internet/social media and the responses written about things like that on HN, you see that some engineers are pessimistic about the way technology will be used.
Or see how the inevitable (and existing) facial recognition companies are talked about. Some love it, but some don't.
If you mean they think the future can be made better with technology in the abstract, sure. But I think some, maybe many, engineers think that the current way technology is being developed and deployed is leading towards dystopian futures, not utopian ones. They may tell themselves that the cool problem they are solving would be solved by someone else, and they get money and a good puzzle. They may tell themselves that it's not their work. They may admit that is the future and say they just want to be in an excellent position in the dystopia. But if you look at the efforts put forth by open-source advocates to fight against closed-source, or the work that goes into blocking ads and tracking, or the way that misinformation propagates over the internet/social media and the responses written about things like that on HN, you see that some engineers are pessimistic about the way technology will be used.
Or see how the inevitable (and existing) facial recognition companies are talked about. Some love it, but some don't.