I was pretty terse about my definition of instinct in my original post, because I thought the post had gone on long enough. But the idea I that am trying to get at is grounded in the concept that emotion and gut feel drive more decisions than we would like to admit, with logic applied to back-justify the decision. Then part two is that by the time someone has risen to the level of decision authority that SW/EE/ME are all answering up through their portfolio, they probably have baked in a lot of intuition about the branch they came up through. That intuition informs their decisions -- but may not be reliable outside of their comfort zone.

Someone who came up through software intuitively knows that while "it is only a 3 line change in each of 4 files", making the change in master is only the beginning. Also on deck are: back-porting and validating in the 4 release branches still running on the 4 hardware versions in the field, and pushing the update reliably, oh, and it changes the log format so our log monitor query needs to be updated and validated.

EE -- yes, it is just changing out one connector -- but we need the latching version and only two latching variants are available, and one requires moving a mounting hole which would require chassis rework, the other is expensive and has a 12 week lead time... and in any case we need to update the test fixtures. And we need to keep some of the old test fixtures around for the old rev, and while we could save some money by reworking some of our old test fixtures, who has time to write and validate the engineering change order for the test fixture rework?

ME -- yes it is only moving two mounting holes, but both the chassis and the skins need to move, so we either have to rework the fleet to accept new skins, or do two sets of expensive tooling for the skins, or do some kludge adapter that allows new skins on old chassis, but we need to vibration test that.

Intuition and instinct are about understanding the implications and the unarticulated risks buried with decisions.