That makes a lot of sense. I've noticed that as somebody who comes from more of a technical support / operations background professionally (but from a standard dev-oriented CS education educationally), that many of my favorite work peers are folks with a military background - and they have that attitude you described. For whatever reason, I've found far more of those people among the support and operations crowd than the dev crowd, and it's really made me frustrated with developers who have that fragile ego you described.