On What Makes A Great Engineer

I’ve had the pleasure of working with talented engineers of the past 3 years at AWS and I thought it would be interesting to document all the traits I’ve seen in the most effective engineers I have seen at the company. By studying and reflecting on these, we can help incorporate these behaviours into our own work and level up our own skills.

Strong Technical Ability

This is probably the most obvious one, all the best Engineer’s I’ve seen have strong technical ability. They have strong knowledge of different frameworks / tooling, and if needed - can learn new things at a rapid pace. It is not necessarily what they know, but their ability to quickly learn new things and add it to their arsenal of tools to use at their disposal.

How do they learn so quick? Its because they aren’t afraid to tinker and fail when first learning these new things. They are not shy from tackling head on these new tools / concepts, and even when the struggle is on they persist to crack on and don’t give up.

Proactivity / Ownership

When there are problems with projects, or something they own breaks, they take ownership and look to fix the issue, or create a plan to help fix it and accurately prioritise it. They dive into the problem instead of just sharing the problem not having look at any solutions.

They don’t just look for work to finally reach them - they proactively push for things to own and improve on.

Communication

This is perhaps the most interesting thing I’ve found, but every great Engineer I’ve met at AWS has had great communication skills. They are able to lead and influence and get along well with peers. During design review’s they clearly express their ideas / rebuttals and aren’t shy from disagreeing with others (respectfully). They aren’t just yes men/woman afraid of conflict - they deeply care about what they work on and know they have a responsibility to work with integrity, leading to my next point.

They Deeply Care About Their Work

I don’t think I’ve met someone who was great who did not look like they were just doing this as purely a job for the paycheck. If you were to talk about the things they work on - they would talk about it like it was their own hobby that they truly love / not just doing it out of duty.

Conclusions

This is my first blog and I’ll leave it at that, and these aren’t like their not obvious traits either - but these are some of the things I’ve noticed in highly effective engineers. I believe if theres one thing that if there’s one thing that you can change that will help incorporate these behaviours - is to care about what you do - and if you don’t - look for reason’s why.