Yes. Put another way, this school of thought concerns professionalism while you're there, when you already know that what you do will still have effects after you're gone.
A different school of thought is that a job is about showing up and doing some interpretation of what your your manager tells you to do. This might not be very aligned, and much of the org chart might not be very aligned, so the priority tends to be appearances. Manager told you to make a Web site that does X, so you try to make a Web site that arguably does X. You don't tell the manager all the factors that in a better organization they should care about, and you maybe don't do a particularly good job of the site you do make, and you definitely don't base all your implementation decisions based on company needs rather than your own resume and political capital. But you're satisfied that you arguably did what you were told to do, and that's the transaction.
The latter school of thought is very common, and I think it's not really due to individual ICs. Rather, usually the organization is actually pushing people towards that thinking, because the org chart and practices are also full of that kind of thinking. A more conscientious professional would blow a gasket, due to the "preposterous" situation of a company of individual irresponsible mercenary behavior and collective dysfunction like that.
I naturally subscribe to the true alignment school of thought, and that's one of the appeals of being a startup founder: I can apply my experience (and, admittedly, just as much theories/guesses) towards building a company and team where things are aligned better. It's also one of the reasons I dread some aspects of founding, because I know that, no matter how good I am about hiring and onboarding into the aligned culture, we'll sometimes have to deal with very mis-aligned (even bad-faith) people from partners/customers/investors. Not only is that unpleasant, but there's the risk of infection.
A different school of thought is that a job is about showing up and doing some interpretation of what your your manager tells you to do. This might not be very aligned, and much of the org chart might not be very aligned, so the priority tends to be appearances. Manager told you to make a Web site that does X, so you try to make a Web site that arguably does X. You don't tell the manager all the factors that in a better organization they should care about, and you maybe don't do a particularly good job of the site you do make, and you definitely don't base all your implementation decisions based on company needs rather than your own resume and political capital. But you're satisfied that you arguably did what you were told to do, and that's the transaction.
The latter school of thought is very common, and I think it's not really due to individual ICs. Rather, usually the organization is actually pushing people towards that thinking, because the org chart and practices are also full of that kind of thinking. A more conscientious professional would blow a gasket, due to the "preposterous" situation of a company of individual irresponsible mercenary behavior and collective dysfunction like that.
I naturally subscribe to the true alignment school of thought, and that's one of the appeals of being a startup founder: I can apply my experience (and, admittedly, just as much theories/guesses) towards building a company and team where things are aligned better. It's also one of the reasons I dread some aspects of founding, because I know that, no matter how good I am about hiring and onboarding into the aligned culture, we'll sometimes have to deal with very mis-aligned (even bad-faith) people from partners/customers/investors. Not only is that unpleasant, but there's the risk of infection.