Great Engineers

A friend asked me a great question this week: “Who are great engineers you know and why are they great?”. And while I immediately had a few people in mind, I had a really hard time answering why I think of them as being so great.

The Archetypes

All of the people that came to mind were very senior engineers that have very specific areas that they excel in. This is typical for Staff level engineers and it's why it's so hard to compare them to each other and to give Senior engineers a clear path to Staff.

There are numerous attempts to define the different archetypes and if you haven't read Will Larson's Staff archetypes before, I recommend you look it up right away. I don't think the specific areas are too important though (e.g. there are different definitions across different companies) and I also think in reality, most people are a mix of all of them.

Here are just some of the archetypes that I have worked with:

• The excitement machine: This is a person that loves the area they work in so much that just talking to them makes you more enthusiastic. They often would work on a prototype for a new feature that would impress the whole organization. They have a unique skill to extrapolate the current trends into longer term visions and also know how to make the next logical step toward that vision. Their excitement helps to align different functions to work towards the same goals.
• The business expert: This person knows the industry they work in by heart. This allows them to make very good tradeoffs between when to focus on technical excellence and when to focus on the business impact. They are usually working really closely with the customers and the sales team and are able to translate the business needs into technical requirements.
• The tech lead: Having built the companies most complex features before, this person has an extremely deep expertise of the codebase. They have also learned, though, that it's not enough to just code solo and now use their experience to work on more strategical planning and mentoring. They bring alignment to the broader organization and help make sure projects are delivered on time and with the right quality.
• The hyperspecialized: This person is so deeply focused in one area that they start to use lingo that only a few people will understand. They are able to connect new problems to past research and will tell you about this one 1992 paper that they feel is massively undervalued.

What They All Have In Common

After thinking of some concrete examples, I was trying to come up with common traits of these folks, too. I wanted to think of something more actionable than "go find your niche". In my experience, great engineers have the following in common:

• Broad technical knowledge: Being an engineer still means you are thinking about code and so all these folks are obviously very good at that. Even the hyperspecialized person has excellent mental models of areas around them. They all have a strong base for the T-shaped skills model.
• Strong communication skills: When I started out, I never thought how important communication skills are. Just show me some code, everything else is irrelevant, right... right? In reality, this can't be further from the truth. The best engineers I know are able to communicate their ideas in a way that is easy to understand for the target audience. They usually demonstrate their skills by writing technical documents or prepare talks that help shape the direction of the company or industry.
• Large networks: To scale their work beyond themselves, great engineers have built and maintain connections to lots of different people in the organization or the broader industry. They are like Saul Goodman in breaking bad and always "know someone" for whatever problem they face. These networks usually span across the engineering organizations and might contain sales, leadership, or even customers. It takes a village to raise a child, right?

The Rest?

I had a daunting realization after thinking through the above that I know so, so many great people that did not came to my mind at all when I thought about great engineers. This is odd because these are people that I would immediately hire and that definitely cover the common traits listed above. So why have I not thought about them?

The answer I arrived at is scale: These engineers, while being absolutely amazing individually, do not scale their impact beyond only a few people. Which lead me to my final conclusion: Great engineers have figured out how to scale their work. They do this by influencing the product/technical direction, upleveling others, being role models or simply giving excellent advice. They are the people you look up to for feedback and that will make you better at what you're doing simply by being around them.