You can change "software" to "hardware" and this is still an all too common viewpoint, even for engineers that should know better.

The unfortunate truth is that approach does work, sometimes. It's really easy and common for capable engineers to think their way out of doing something because of all the different things they can think about it.

Sometimes, an unreasonable dumbass whose only authority comes from corporate heirarchy is needed to mandate the engineers start chipping away at the tasks. If they weren't a dumbass, they'd know the unreasonable thing they're mandating, and if they weren't unreasonable, they wouldn't mandate the someone does it.

I am an an engineer. "Sometimes" could be swapped for "rarely" above, but the point still stands: as much frustration as I have towards those people, they do occasionally lead to the impossible being delivered. But then again, a stopped clock -> twice a day etc.

That approach sometimes does work, but usually very poorly and often not at all.

It can work very well when the higher-up is well informed and does have deep technical experience and understanding. Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are great, well-known examples of this. They've also provided great examples of the same approach mostly failing when applied outside of their areas of deep expertise and understanding.

if they're only right twice a day, you can run out of money doing stupid things before you hit midnight. in practice, there's a difference between a PHB asking a "stupid" question that leads to engineers having a lightbulb moment, vs a PHB insisting on going down a route that will never work.