What makes strong engineers strong?
As I’ve written about before, what defines a strong engineer is the ability to do tasks that weaker engineers can’t, even with near-unlimited time. But what are the concrete skills or traits that make up that ability? What is it about strong engineers that makes them able to do a much wider range of tasks? In order of importance, I think it’s self-belief, pragmatism, speed, and technical ability.
Strong engineers believe they can succeed, even on hard or unfamiliar problems. Many technically capable people are weak engineers purely because they lack confidence. Why? Because software problems are all unfamiliar problems. Software engineers work in the dark. For almost every piece of real work, it’s impossible to say how tricky it’ll be to do until it’s completed. That’s why estimation in tech companies is famously hard: you just don’t know ahead of time what issues are going to come up.
There are many smart people who just can’t work in this environment. It violates their core engineering sense-of-self to talk about projects when they’re not sure of the technical details, or to start work on a project where so much is still unknown. To be a strong engineer, you need the raw confidence to believe that you will figure it out, whatever it is (or if it’s genuinely too hard, then the problem must be so fiendish that there’s no shame in failing to solve it)1.
