I tend to think that much of the difference between great and mediocre engineers comes down to mindset. The great engineers I've encountered have a commitment t

I tend to think that much of the difference between great and mediocre engineers comes down to mindset. The great engineers I've encountered have a commitment to making everything they touch better. They are adaptable and persevere. They believe they will either succeed at the task at hand or conclusively determine that it isn't possible given the current constraints. They recognize that failure will happen and do not get discouraged by it and instead see it as an opportunity to growth. When they encounter an issue caused by systemic problems, they will try to fix it systemically. They will not ship the first draft and will take a little it of extra time to get things right, which slows the initial release slightly but more than pays for itself with a dramatically lower maintenance burden. This type of engineer is often misunderstood and underappreciated by management. Management is often motivated by immediate short term goals. Instead of cherishing the work of the engineers who build the foundational systems that will enable the long term success of the org, they complain about them missing arbitrary short term goals and accuse them of doing engineering for engineering sake instead of real work. Management will celebrate the coder who whips up a buggy, but cool, feature in a week and will look the other way at the fact that the feature will always be a little bit broken because of its shoddy construction and instead will allocate some lesser engineers to maintain it. If instead the feature had been built correctly from the start, it may have been launched a bit later, but the overall cost will be much lower. Moreover, the poor engineers who are forced to maintain it (and let's be honest, the people who quickly churn out shoddy but shiny work almost never have to maintain it themselves) will not only be wasting their time, they will be actively internalizing the anti-patterns present in the code. This both inhibits their growth and understanding of good design principles and teaches them the bad lesson that crap is good and unless they have a uniquely strong character or good mentors, they will tend to either become demoralized (hurting their productivity and value to the company) or they will internalize the incentive to get out of maintenance work and build shoddy features of their own to pass down to the next poor soul. The truly great engineer is the one who breaks this cycle by building extendable systems that are correct by design and takes accountability for everything they ship. They raise up the entire org both by their work and example. In the long run, they will be far more productive and positively impactful than the sloppy cowboy coder. Unfortunately, the industry writ large celebrates and incentivizes cowboy coding so doing the right thing is very much against the grain. Indeed, the people who rise up the org chart tend to be the cowboys so they cannot even see the value of the other way and will often actively antagonize or undermine those who do the right thing (and threaten their dominant position in the org).