Humans use biases like how good something or someone looks. As well as other shortcuts and gut feeling. Engineer's biases are different from normal people though. For example a normal person would see someone good looking as competent, and if you don't understand it means that good looking guy is also very smart...
This is well into delusions of grandeur territory. “Engineers” are normal people. “Engineers” do all the same stuff that everyone else does. The only difference is that “engineers” bring some technical understanding to the table that might not otherwise be there, just as any other subject matter expert would. This subject matter expertise will bring varying degrees of value depending on the situation.
I hate this self-congratulatory take that people that write software are godly and unbreakably objective. Software people are just so typically introverted and insular that we have our own social signals that can just as easily be weaponised to have us buy stuff.
I think it's more a mindset than possession of technical knowledge.
I needed to buy some new cutlery. I knew nothing about cutlery, so I went and learned about steel grades, serration types, food service industry standards, etc. In the end, after a few weeks of on-and-off research, I ended up with an excellent WMF set. I told this story to a friend and she laughed, remarking that she would have just gone to the store to get some.
Our needs were the same, but I took a detail-oriented approach focusing on the product, whereas she focused on the solution. Both approaches are valid for our respective priorities, but I'd hazard that the types of people who become engineers (be it software or something else) are more likely to relate to stories like mine.
