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In my experience, passion is key. I consider great engineers to be engineers who get things done and their solution stands up to review over time. These types

In my experience, passion is key. I consider great engineers to be engineers who get things done and their solution stands up to review over time. These types of answers are usually tell-tale signs of engineers that are harder to work. But from my 20+ years experience, they are not necessarily a sign of engineers lacking passion. I've found great engineers who said the following: * I have no idea how it works (he was talking about Windows and explaining why he preferred Linux) * I've learned all I've ever want to know about... (he was talking about Visual Basic) * There is no solution... (reaching a consensus every time) * I'm an expert in Ruby (he was) * I don't understand the business... (I'm just trying to make great software) edit: I removed the Jeff Bezos line. This came from a keynote he made at Stanford. He was really saying that he doesn't pay much attention to his competitors.

fecak 14y ago
Author here, and some good points raised. A couple thoughts: * If an engineer explained why he preferred Linux to windows, he wouldn't be thorough if he didn't at least have some understanding as to why Linux was a better solution. I would assume some knowledge of the workings of Windows would be necessary to contrast the two systems. One could simply point to a performance metric perhaps, but a great engineer should dig deeper to make an effective argument. * There are certainly some people who will claim to be experts in a particular area. True experts, in most cases, won't have to say it. * Trying to make great software to solve business problems should require some understanding of the business problems being solved, no? I don't think you can really solve a problem without knowing what the problem is. Of course, my comments here are assuming that you are building software to solve a problem for a business - the 'business' could be substituted with 'the problem being solved', and perhaps that would make more sense for my statement if you are taking the word business literally.

fecak 14y ago

Author here, and some good points raised. A couple thoughts: * If an engineer explained why he preferred Linux to windows, he wouldn't be thorough if he didn't at least have some understanding as to why Linux was a better solution. I would assume some knowledge of the workings of Windows would be necessary to contrast the two systems. One could simply point to a performance metric perhaps, but a great engineer should dig deeper to make an effective argument. * There are certainly some people who will claim to be experts in a particular area. True experts, in most cases, won't have to say it. * Trying to make great software to solve business problems should require some understanding of the business problems being solved, no? I don't think you can really solve a problem without knowing what the problem is. Of course, my comments here are assuming that you are building software to solve a problem for a business - the 'business' could be substituted with 'the problem being solved', and perhaps that would make more sense for my statement if you are taking the word business literally.