Can it be taught, or does it have be learned from experience ?

"New" engineers/programmers are very similar to teenagers in this respect. If you do not know about teenagers, the answer is you can teach, they will not learn. I happen to recall a quote from (one of) Yourdons first book "after several years of experience, most programmers learn that the most important quality of a program is that it works reliably, not how elegant the code is"

Erik