His enthusiasm for changing the world is replaced with nit-picking the development process.
Worse of all, though, his concern that “We aren’t building the right thing” will be replaced with “We aren’t building the thing right.”
He’s learned to not give input on what is built, so he becomes obsessed with how it’s built.
Your culture, for him, has become survival of the fittest.
Related to yesterday’s note on complex vs. complicated, focusing on the how might be an auto-defensive attitude toward an uncontrollable environment. Complicated code as a fallback to complex relations, something you can build upon without the versatility of humanities.
Between the two? JavaScript :p