I agree wholeheartedly that it is not a good way to live. I don't enjoy it. > I've worked at a lot of places where engineer got into heated shouting matches. I

I agree wholeheartedly that it is not a good way to live. I don't enjoy it. > I've worked at a lot of places where engineer got into heated shouting matches. It's is not a way to increase the probability of zeroing in on a problem, or reaching agreement faster. That hasn't been my experience. A boss at a previous job and I often had heated discussions about technologies and direction. It worked for us. We came to great solutions that neither of us started advocating. Years after I left, we are still good friends. One lady we worked with started keeping a nerf gun on her desk if we got too close to her while arguing. This was the problem for me. It wasn't good for us to fall back on raised voices to accomplish discussion. It accomplished the goals, but it did it in a way that was bad for our psyche. Even if we are both willing participants in that, we were effecting others who were both not willing participants AND unwilling to speak up because we were both her senior. So I say fuck that. There is a way to say what needs to be said without being an asshole or spending time trying to make it politically correct. You just have to say the core of what you are trying to say, without the asshole flair attached to it.