Perhaps.

 Which part of designing an airplane is the least difficult?

If you said the Aerodynamics, you would get a call from the structures people to discuss about the F word at various speeds and loadouts affecting particular portions of the design.

If you went and said propulsion, a weight and balance guy might say your engine is too heavy/too powerful and has a poor location relative to the location on the airframe (ahem).

Complaining about avionics bays and the space that it occupies might be the job of the landing gear people, who mutter about those large cable bundles that run through their section to another part of the aircraft.

The electrics guy keeps a length of cable spare for the hydraulics guy, and the monkey wrench in the toolbox looks like it has another non-productive use, that usually involves zip ties and blankets.

Seriously of course, relationships are the heart and soul of any program or project, Poor relations mean low morale, low productivity, lack of interest and motivation.

"Lets get the job done'' we tell ourselves, a job well done is its own reward. However, pressure is not the deadline, pressure is the stress within the individual. Work plays a very integral part in life, whether we like it or not, we dedicate our time and talent, to produce great things, but sometimes this can go awry.

Everyone is afraid of pink paper.

Life rewards people unfairly,  but that is a risk that many have no choice but to accept.

The difference is humility, knowing your limits and knowing your self. If you really can't do what the other guy did, you can always ask them to show you, unless its not part of your job, and even then knowledge never hurt anyone, unless it was misused.

The whole of organization, is based on the collective productivity of the whole. Criticism of its workings is an essential part of the process, allowing things to be organized better or to weed out any ill conceived practices and ideas. In short, someone has to be the bad guy.

A career in Engineering assumes much. We are told we are working for a common purpose. That purpose is to develop our product or complete our project. We assume that the work done to the best of our abilities is the best solution, whence alas it may not. We assume much of our co-workers and our boss, hoping that there is a common ground shared by all. Except that this hope is the bane of competitiveness, and sometimes produces poor work not fit for use.

One has to love the work, but in the sterile conditions of the engineering office, that leaves nothing to be inspired, most persons can only feel the build-up of stress. It takes a special person the be an engineer, and a very gifted person to be a good one. The best engineers have a patience to wait their turn and prefer being the underdog and thus to shirk responsibility, until that that responsibility is given to them exclusively. They are actually very good poker players.

Life as an engineer isn't so cut and dried. In the medical profession, your failings as a doctor are countered by the efforts made to save your patient, and sometimes this is a futile exercise. In engineering, it was always just reckoning, and seeing whose idea was best, relative to the costs. In the sciences, a hypothesis need not be correct provided that there were arguments that would show the holes in the theory, despite our efforts of course. In engineering, the theory has already been figured out. Your job is to use that theory to make good on it, to see if there is something that can be made from it.  The are many more comparisons, but I can't list them all here,

Perhaps the best any engineer can do, is to make the best of the situation as presented, and sometimes that means sticking up for your design and taking charge of your turf. Sometimes it means going against the consensus, because you know that there is a better solution out there. Sometimes it means that you have to surrender in the face of an enlightened experience whose know how is far greater than the groups collective.

Whatever the arguments, perhaps the the best thing any engineer can realistically do, is to continue to be, just an ordinary engineer.