Most of the time, the product itself comes out of engineering just fine and then it gets torn up and/or ruined by the business side of the company. That said, sometimes people do make mistakes - in my mind, it’s more of how they’re handled by the company (oftentimes poorly). One of the products my team worked on a few years ago was one that required us to spin up our own ASIC. We spun one up (in the neighborhood of ~20-30 million dollars USD), and a few months later, found a critical flaw in it. So we spun up a second ASIC, again spending $20-30M, and when we were nearly going to release the product, we discovered a bad flaw in the new ASIC. The products worked for the most part, but of course not always, as the bug would sometimes get hit. My company did the right thing and never released the product, though.

[–] pineapplelover@lemm.ee 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

It's almost never the engineers fault. That whole Nasa spacecraft that exploaded was due to bureaucracy and pushing the mission forwards.