In my experience, the 'heads down; just let me code and go home' attitude is beaten into a lot of engineers by a series of bad experiences with management. Experiences in which their input is repeatedly ignored in favor of what seems like management bullshit.

> if you want to be involved at the upper levels, nothing is stopping you. you just need to either find that job, or create one for yourself.

I'd imagine many engineers are coming at it from a slightly different perspective. They're used to being able to self-teach. They're used to REPLs, where getting instant feedback is easy. They're used to having the luxury of rapidly iterating on failure before they get it right. They're used to a world of technical decisions where being smart and right is often enough to win.

Trying the same process with management bites them in the ass, and disillusions them.

It sounds like you envy their freedom to put their head down as much as they envy your freedom to _matter_.

Ultimately, you're not totally wrong, but complaining about the symptoms without treating the cause isn't productive.