I cannot help but read this whole experience as: “We forced an engineer to take sales calls and we …

This is the first thing that struck me. Why does the OP still have a job if a line engineer can do it better? Promote the guy to CTO, and fire the useless chumps who were collecting a paycheck spinning their wheels.

You're assuming they have Product Managers at all. Or that they're not massively oversubscribed.

That could be the case, but I work in a mechanical engineering group as the only person on the team who can write code or automate things with it. We're in a large corporation with a sizeable IT support group that builds a decent chunk of the software in-house, and our team views much of it as terrible. So, I've rewritten applications or supplemented the "terrible" but irreplaceable software with tools to make our jobs much easier. I don't think that I'm better than our in-house IT folks at software development but that my perspective as an actual end-user gives me a much better idea of how to meet our own needs. I'm also highly motivated to make it effective, since I'll be using it. So, the title initially resonated with me and didn't see this comment coming. That said, I'm sure your point is valid in many cases as I'm not familiar with formal software development / project management.

Well--well look. I already told you: I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?

Most engineers turn up at meetings with product managers with two major problems: 1. They assume they know more than everyone else. Got a guy who has had a problem for 5 years and tried 20 different solutions? The engineers will spend 10 minutes thinking about it, come up with a solution (that won't work, but they insist it will) and dismiss the problem as "trivial", and think the guy is an idiot. I've done it myself (which I'm embarrassed to admit), and I've seen it at every level from junior to Staff/Principal in companies large and small. The lack of modesty in software engineering teams is perhaps my #1 peeve with the industry. As a result, they often end up designing terrible solutions. 2. Once they understand a problem and a solution, they are frequently awful at thinking through the solution from the user perspective unless they themselves have experienced the problem. This isn't …

Even in orgs with product managers, engineers can have a really bad habit of wanting to rewrite stuff, or designing things the way they want them to work instead of focusing on customer needs and problems

On the contrary, this pm did provide engineering a valuable lesson, they likely need to repeat every year or so - call it user training, it's a bit like sec training.

Yep, notice there was no mention at all about why the original software was so ill-designed in the first place. Not even a curiosity as to why. Your conclusion is more valid, though I wouldn't necessarily place the blame on the PM. Agile/Scrum rituals, where blame is diffused and developers are forced to sprint quickly through poorly-designed tickets, yields poorly-designed software. Who could have guessed? Feels like a systematic problem with the "modern" bloated software organization.