My husband is the best tech mentor I know. I changed careers from education to information technology in my late 30s. At the time, he had already been working as a software engineer for over a decade. As a new programmer who also had communication responsibilities, I loved how his advice helped me frame my choices when the mandates from the executives or even customers seemed unrealistic.
Engineers are wonderful because they deal with facts and options and incongruities. They will tell you if a choice you have made is incongruent with your intended outcome. It’s true that many will tell you exactly how they think you should solve your problem. They may say you’ll have to give up on some of the requirements or your budget or your timeline but this is not always true. Staff have walked past my office listening to intense white boarding sessions between my husband and myself while thinking that we were arguing. We were passionately negotiating until we reached a good solution to the problem. Years later we have refined our communication so that our sessions rarely get as intense, but the point is that technology leaders need to work with visionaries as well as engineers to deliver good solutions. A team of engineers on their own will deliver a hard shelled monstrosity that is unusable by anyone but a genius. Visionaries without special technical skill can deliver a narrowly focused solution that breaks at the first or second adaption. A creative thinker can take the input from an engineer to devise solutions no one thought possible.