If you use Russ Cox's definition of software engineering, "Software engineering is what happens to programming when you add time, and other programmers.", softw

If you use Russ Cox's definition of software engineering, "Software engineering is what happens to programming when you add time, and other programmers.", software engineering is mostly soft skills, related to working with other people (including future you). Real skills, but not really technical skills, and things which almost no one will just have "out of the box", ie something to work at. It sounds like these guys are really good technically, but they lack software engineering skills (using the above definition). Defining the problem in terms of brains or selfishness or empathy makes it sound like personal qualities when it's probably just the skills. If you frame the discussion around Russ Cox's definition of software engineering, you can a) get them to see the soft skills defined concretely, b) get them to see serious people (russ is a serious engineer) take it seriously and define it in a helpful way and c) talk about under the umbrella of "software engineering" and doing "good software engineering" (again, using Russ's definition of it) rather than personal qualities or technical skills.