I think he is wrong: STEM (especially programming) is excellent at proving the person to have failed.
You cannot create software without experience failure a hundred times a day.
Compare this to humanities like literature: how many times a day is a literature teacher proven to have made a mistake? How much real experience does this person have with failure? How many times have your literature teacher admitted "I made a mistake"?
So the STEM person is likely to be confident because s/he has a lot of experience with failure and know how to handle them, and how much they can delay progress.
>I think he is wrong: STEM (especially programming) is excellent at proving the person to have failed.
Yeah, i think the author has mixed STEM as a field with tech-startups business side where hustling attitude is advised and often necessary to be honest.
For what it’s worth, I’m not saying that confidence (even hubris!) is bad! Without his confidence, said senior engineer probably wouldn’t have built his successful project.
If I had any literary skill, I’d write a tragedy in which the hero’s flaw is his lack of hubris. (Perhaps it would be autobiographical - my grad school advisor said my weakness is that I’m not arrogant enough.)
You cannot create software without experience failure a hundred times a day.
Compare this to humanities like literature: how many times a day is a literature teacher proven to have made a mistake? How much real experience does this person have with failure? How many times have your literature teacher admitted "I made a mistake"?
So the STEM person is likely to be confident because s/he has a lot of experience with failure and know how to handle them, and how much they can delay progress.