To the optimist, the glass is half full. To the pessimist its half empty. And to the engineer, the glass is twice the size it needs to be. As an engineer, I love that joke. It gets right at the heart of why we as enginerds often have such a hard time communicating with real people. However, it also reminds me just how demoralizing it can be to work with the pessimist. Attitudes in software development To Mr./Ms. Pessimism new ideas and new thinking are “yet another thing I have to learn”,...