Fascinating post.  Coming from an Engineering background I'd like to echo what another commenter said - Ideas must be treated harshly.  If it's a bad idea then

Fascinating post.  Coming from an Engineering background I'd like to echo what another commenter said - Ideas must be treated harshly.  If it's a bad idea then it needs to be vetted and corrected, especially if it's likely to kill someone.  You owe it to the honor of the profession to do so.  But you have to attack the idea and not the person.  When egos are involved that's not easy, because the person may view an attack on their idea as a personal attack.  Just assume the person is as intelligent as you and had a good reason for their "bad" idea.  Maybe you can build on it without completely discarding it.  As for language, I've never understood the online "geek" community's tendancy to be grammar and spelling "nazis." There have been times where I've been the only native English speaker on a team, both professionally and in college.  If we spent all of our time discussing Strunk and White we would have never finished what we were doing.  Yet on the internet, where "exposure" to non-native speakers is commonplace, these practices seem to be the norm.  Boggling.  (It's one thing to be helpful, it's another to be petty.  Petty strikes me as professionally immature.) In short: A crash-course in interpersonal communications would help everybody.  Thanks for the blog post.