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>Let's take it a step further: agreeable people don't care about good engineering. They can't, by definition.

this sounds like another way of saying there is ever only one right way of doing something?

If on the other hand you believe that engineering is about tradeoffs, then being agreeable might be a willingness to work out what tradeoffs to make.

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exactly, seems like a big oversimplification. I'm "agreeable" at work, as in, let's see if you are correct about your way, and if not, we'll correct it based on the data. Rarely there is a predictable binary decision about how to build stuff, at least in software.

I use the "safe enough to try" test. If I can't convince my coworker or employee that my idea has better tradeoffs (using my 30+ years of experience), I'm humble enough to know that maybe I'm wrong. I then ask myself the question "is what they are proposing safe enough to try?" If the answer is yes, then they will do their work their way and we'll learn something. They will learn the old guy might know a thing or two or I'll learn that new things come along all the time.

Either way, we are better off for it.

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