[jdavis703]

It's probably because they are. I've worked at one place where the engineers were children (I was also an engineer there). For example in one stand-up the participants refused to stand, other times all you'd hear were "dog ate my homework" type excuses for why a project or story was running late. This was usually more team specific, and I started to learn how to avoid the more childish teams. Shockingly management treated the more mature teams with more respect.

[erikb]

Yeah that can happen as well. I was just lucky enough to have not worked in that kind of environment yet. Maybe because I am also an engineer at heart I think too highly of us, but in contrast to many other jobs I believe that engineers have a higher desire to deliver good work (even if the definition of good is different for everyone). Therefore the engineers I know often push themselves, to some degree even harder than management pushes them.

[mercer]

> but in contrast to many other jobs I believe that engineers have a higher desire to deliver good work (even if the definition of good is different for everyone)

That's my experience too. But your parenthetical remark is a very important point!

I've been in plenty of situations where an engineer cared too much about delivering 'good' work by their own definition of good, when clearly it clearly wasn't 'good' for the company/team/product. In fact, I've been that engineer myself a few times, where only in hindsight I realized that I didn't see the bigger picture.

[JamesBarney]

I'm curious, what were the "dog ate my homework" excuses you got for why a story or project was running late?

[jdavis703]

For example "I didn't have any Internet so I couldn't work" (this is in SF, you can tether your phone, go to a cafe, go home and work, etc).