What Makes a Great Software Engineer (Dissertation) (2016) [pdf]

We certainly know what makes bad developers:

* decision anxiety

* fear of writing original ideas, both natural language and code

* the inability to measure things

* preference towards bias

* cognitive conservatism

* inability to form assertion criteria

Real engineers proceed on the basis of evidence and in the absence of evidence make arbitrary original decisions as necessary to gather evidence.

Decision anxiety, measuring things, and a preference toward bias are basically all you need to skewer anyone who has a different opinion than you. If they want more data they are anxious if you want more data they rush to an opinion.. Then they are either wasting your time with measurements when the project is done or not taking improvement seriously.

Nonsense. Just be honest that you have either evidence or a hypothesis. If you are in charge make an arbitrary decision or defer to the person that is in charge. Everything else is posturing by people that cannot perform, typically due to an irrational fear or some face saving silliness.

There's certainly many dimensions along these lines that if you don't think about them in relation to the type of software development you are doing, and what you have done, you will take a long time to improve.. But this being the model for all software development (such that all others are bad) strikes me as a missing chapter from printf.

https://ferd.ca/the-little-printf.html