If you are hired as a programmer, then yes, just do whatever we ask of you.

But if you are hired as an engineer, everything the business asks of you comes with an implicit: "and make sure it's done in a proper way that won't break anything, or slow us down, or cost us too much, or limit our ability to gain a competitive edge."

You don't just change a 3 to a 4 because the CEO wants you to. You have to make sure the change doesn't come with unforseen impact that would put the company at risk, and you have to make the change in a similar way. That's what the CEO expects also. If you did the change, and it had caused impact to the business, that you had not pointed out, and for which the business believe is more harmful then having waited a few more days, you and only you are to blame, and you will be. You can't say, but CEO told me, you're the engineer, you're the person they hired to know this stuff and prevent these issues from happening, not the CEO.

If the CEO lacks the understanding of the technical consequences of a change that may blow up the company, the engineer should make the decision. If the engineer lacks understanding of the business consequences of not making the change - like losing an important client, or suffering a wave of negative PR, or facing a lawsuit - then the CEO should make it. Ideally, both sides should be communicating these consequences so that both of them have all the relevant information and would ideally make the same decision. Then the decisions can get made at the lowest level that has all this information, and the CEO doesn't have to get involved.

In practice, there are many cases where the CEO can't communicate all of the relevant business realities, eg. if you're facing a lawsuit if you don't make a change, it's often better not to worry the rest of the staff or make them subject to depositions, and simply to ensure that the change gets made. That's why the CEO is the decider by default in organizations, and also why it's usually expected that employees will obey a direct order from the CEO or be fired.

But if Scotty delivers on time at the cost of overloading an expensive piece of equipment that, after the battle is won, requires a week in drydock to replace, that's probably a successful execution of exactly the kind of call a senior engineering manager is expected to make.

In the example with the line of code that took 6 days, there was no dramatic emergency in production that required cutting corners. If it had been an emergency, of course the code refactoring demanded in code review should have been postponed; those changes increased the impact of the change, and therefore the resting requirements.

And if it really is an emergence that requires people to drop what they're doing, then someone with sufficient authority should be directly involved in order to override all the usual procedures.

But you don't just drop all procedures just because somebody claims somebody said something. That would be dangerously irresponsible.

In your example, Scotty knew what he was doing though. He didn't say, wow, what Kirk wants me to do could kill twenty redshirts in the process, I'll just take the gamble since he seems to want me to. He knew exactly the impact, and made it knowing he would easily be able to contain it.

Which is often not the case in Software and in practice. You have to do something to know the impact, because most problem we solve is always new. Its not something we did many times before. If that variable was often changed, then it would be completely different, because he'd known, just like Scotty, that its something they can do. In that case you can make the choice to say, lets change it, and later handle the tech dept of the less maintainable code.

Also, in software, its almost never the case that people can't wait a few more days.

In my opinion, computer science and engineering is not about just making the code you're told, it's about questioning whether that code needs to be done in the first place, and if so, how.

It still depends.

This is a distinction that is a very thin line and most people with "engineer" in their title would not sign up for.

It all my years (15) of professional experience, I've only worked under one PE, an Electrical Engineer.

In some states you literally can not have "engineer" in your job title unless you have a PE certificate/accreditation/whatever.

But if people's jobs were truly on the line, I'm inclined to agree with the "screw it, push it through" approach.

David: It's for Philip. It we don't do this right away, we'll have to have a layoff.

and

Judy: OK, then I'll fill out that section myself and put this on the fast track. ----- 2 days later. ----- David: What's the status of 129281?

"It we don't do this right away, we'll have to have a layoff" and "2 days later", making an impression of this is an "a day or two" task, not a "fire/emergency"

I don't think if this change finished in 2 days anyone will be unhappy. But if you took this to production, and somehow failed, everyone would blame QA/testing

The engineer did their due diligence, wrote tests to make sure it had the desired behaviour, and got it done in minimal time. Clearing technical debt in old modules should be done, I agree, but not while trying to put out fires. It adds considerable risk to a change which should not have any impact except for the request.

In theory, could informed, intelligent, rational actors without ulterior motive do so, sure. I'd sleep on a couch and eat ramen for the chance to be part of such a team, but I haven't met them.