Being primarily an engineer myself, I can't help to say 'yes, but' you might want to rephrase this into 'untrained engineers' or 'some engineers' or 'uncreative engineers' or similar. Don't get me wrong, I know the people you talk about and I simply cannot deny I used to be like this myself sometimes but over the years this changed into something bimodal. I.e. when needed I will always fall back to 'how can this fail' mode - just because it's often required to properly fix/create things which won't brake, but I find myself defaulting to generating tons of ideas. But I'm also creative b nature so that helps. In fact most other engineers (by education or not, doesn't matter) I know also clearly use a mix of both modes. There's only a couple which don't (and even some which default to only creating a mess, not seeing any problem, but that's something else and I'm not sure if it's an engineer:).
Being primarily an engineer myself, I can't help to say 'yes, but' you might want to rephrase this into 'untrained engineers' or 'some engineers' or 'uncreative engineers' or similar. Don't get me wrong, I know the people you talk about and I simply cannot deny I used to be like this myself sometimes but over the years this changed into something bimodal. I.e. when needed I will always fall back to 'how can this fail' mode - just because it's often required to properly fix/create things which won't brake, but I find myself defaulting to generating tons of ideas. But I'm also creative b nature so that helps. In fact most other engineers (by education or not, doesn't matter) I know also clearly use a mix of both modes. There's only a couple which don't (and even some which default to only creating a mess, not seeing any problem, but that's something else and I'm not sure if it's an engineer:).