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

Sure there are always edge cases and unknowns. Additionally we each have a limited capacity for condition variability. All of that can be qualified away by people who have prior experience. By prior experience I don't mean ample work history (vague), but people who have participated in a given scenario in the past (highly specific).

The problem space there comes from only two considerations. The first of which is a team where nobody has the required prior experience. In that case confidence drops in proportion to the increase of uncertainty, but that does not necessarily result in an increase of anxiety. Some people and/or work cultures are much better positioned than others to confront stress directly without distressing towards anxiety.

The second consideration is the collision between prior experience and evidence. In this case both the evidence and the prior experience must be considered and an alternate conclusion must be reached. That alternate conclusion is the definition of truth according to John Stuart Mills.