Lest we as an audience be overly flattered by the "engineer's mindset," it's probably best to remind ourselves that in the field of software there are plenty of discussions and divisions that are frequently litigated in a tribal, adversarial manner. And that's just inside the field. Software engineers don't exactly end up uniformly distributed politically either.

So either we don't apply the engineer's mindset all the time, or the engineer's mindset has limits itself when it comes to bringing consensus. I suspect it's both, but maybe particularly the latter: every problem human engineers care about includes human values at some level, and human values aren't equally weighted (or even shared at all) across humans.

The mindset required to work on that last problem might not be engineer's mindset or lawyer's mindset.