Workers aren't well empowered in many of those situations, at least in my experience.
Those productive engineers? They figured enough of office politics skills to do the equivalent of taking a manager to a dark alley, then leaving the mutilated remains hanging from the "gate" to their time.
Unfortunately, those skills are not skills we teach anyone, at least not in computing. Meanwhile, project management seems to be a common subject in engineering classes in other areas...
I completely agree it is a dysfunctional work environment where the engineer's only recourse to having a sane schedule is taking their "manager to a dark alley."
That said, framing the problem as: "those skills are not skills we teach anyone" is the problem.
Once you can recognize a skill gap, you can fix it. You can be the teacher.
Well, I recognize my own lack of skills there. What's worse is that I also have a generally uphill battle with interpersonal skills, so I'm really not the person to teach them to anyone.
However, so long as we don't have professional courses taking this into account I don't think we can talk about teaching "software engineers".
Those productive engineers? They figured enough of office politics skills to do the equivalent of taking a manager to a dark alley, then leaving the mutilated remains hanging from the "gate" to their time.
Unfortunately, those skills are not skills we teach anyone, at least not in computing. Meanwhile, project management seems to be a common subject in engineering classes in other areas...