To be fair, it reads precisely “1. The best engineers are obsessed with solving user problems”. This doesn’t say those engineers are working at Google, just that it’s something the author learned whilst they worked at Google.

“Some [of these lessons] would have saved me months of frustration”, to quote the preamble.

I was going post exactly this! He was talking about those engineers that really exemplified, from his point of view, good engineers.

And dealing with engineering managers that didn't see much use in such activity might be part of "figur[ing] out how to navigate everything around the code: the people, the politics, the alignment, the ambiguity".