I like marcosdumay’s point very much. In itself asking people to boast is a recipe for disaster. I make the parralel with your “A is confident about their comp

I like marcosdumay’s point very much. In itself asking people to boast is a recipe for disaster. I make the parralel with your “A is confident about their competency”: have they more to say about their confidence ? what did they actually do and do you have trust they did it well ? Digging further, if you end up at a point where both A and B did roughly the same things at the same level but B shows critical sense about what they did and trusts you enough to talk about it, B is to me the obvious choice. When shit hits the fan, you don’t want people who’s first principles are to cover themselves. But this is all based on you going past confidence displays and caring enough to dig further. Which concede is not something we’ll do all the time; if I need to buy some coffee I actually don’t care much if it’s from A or B, and could easily go with A (or choose B by pure curiosity or any other reason, who knows)