In my job, I work with many engineers every day. They are just like any other occupation, some good, some bad. We don’t have the luxury of playing scientist, because of timelines set up by the company. Got to get new product ready and out the door. It would be nice to experiment and see what the best solution is, but that’s not what they pay me for.
Fair enough, That sadi, I started out as an engineer. But even then I took time to experiment (do the math, make a hypothesis, test, prove or disprove, rinse and repeat). Have moved onto other things, but still do some real science (right now in the quantum mechanics space). Just part of who I am...