Comment by AdieuToLogic

This post is about corporate politics, not "shipping projects." To wit:

  If you ship something users hate and makes no money, but 
  your leadership team is happy, you still shipped. You can 
  feel any way you like about that, but it’s true. If you 
  don’t like it, you should probably go work for companies 
  that really care how happy their users are.

When the stated goal is to make leadership happy and not solving customer problems such that customers are "happy", that is pretty much the definition of politics. As subsequently identified therein:

  Engineers who think shipping means delivering a spec or 
  deploying code will repeatedly engineer their way into 
  failed ships.

I would question the ethics of engineers whom employ a strategy of preferring politics over delivering solutions.

EDIT: clarified the ethical question.