The following is copied verbatim from https://www.kitchensoap.com/2012/10/25/on-being-a-senior-engineer/ -- this gist is merely a partial backup of that excellent article.
For my own thoughts on the subject (which I still agree with having now read the above link) see my post called "The Perfect Developer Qualities": https://www.integralist.co.uk/posts/the-perfect-developer-qualities/
Mature engineers seek out constructive criticism of their designs.
Every successful engineer I’ve met, upon finishing up a design or getting ready for a project, will continually ask their peers questions along the lines of:
- “What could I be missing?”
- “How will this not work?”
- “Will you please shoot as many holes as possible into my thinking on this?”
- “Even if it’s technically sound, is it understandable enough for the rest of the organization to operate, troubleshoot, and extend it?”
This is because they know that nothing they make will ever only be in their hands, and that good peer review is what makes better design decisions. As it’s been said elsewhere, they “beg for the bad news.”
Mature engineers understand the non-technical areas of how they are perceived.
Being able to write a Bloom Filter in Erlang, or write multi-threaded C in your sleep is insufficient. None of that matters if no one wants to work with you. Mature engineers know that no matter how complete, elegant, or superior their designs are, it won’t matter if no one wants to work alongside them because they are assholes. Condescension, belittling, narcissism, and ego-boosting behavior send the message to other engineers (maybe tacitly) to stay away. Part of being happy in engineering comes from enjoying the company of the people you work with while designing and building things. An engineer who is quick to call someone a moron is someone destined to stunt his or her career.
This also means that mature engineers have self-awareness when it comes to their communication. This isn’t to say that every mature engineer communicates perfectly, only that they have some notion about where they could be better, and continually ask for a gut-check from peers and managers on how they’re doing. They aim to be assertive, not passive or aggressive in how they get their ideas across.
I’ve mentioned it elsewhere, but I must emphasize the point more: the degree to which other people want to work with you is a direct indication on how successful you’ll be in your career as an engineer. Be the engineer that everyone wants to work with.
Now this isn’t to say that you should shy away from giving (or getting) constructive criticism on the work produced by engineering (as opposed to the engineer personally), for fear of pissing someone off. There’s a difference between calling someone a moron and pointing out faults in their code or product.
Mature engineers do not shy away from making estimates, and are always trying to get better at it.
Avoiding responsibility for estimates is another way of saying, “I’m not ready to be relied upon for building critical pieces of infrastructure.” All businesses rely on estimates, and all engineers working on a project are involved in Joint Activity, which means that they have a responsibility to others to make themselves interpredictable. In general, mature engineers are comfortable with working within some nonzero amount of uncertainty and risk.
Mature engineers have an innate sense of anticipation, even if they don’t know they do.
This code looks good, I’m proud of myself. I’ve asked other people to review it, and I’ve taken their feedback. Now: how long will it last before it’s rewritten? Once it’s in production, how will its execution affect resource usage? How much so I expect CPU/memory/disk/network to increase or decrease? Will others be able to understand this code? Am I making it as easy as I can for others to extend or introspect this work?
Mature engineers understand that not all of their projects are filled with rockstar-on-stage work.
Getting things done means doing things you might not be interested in. No matter how sexy a project is, there are always boring tasks. Tedious tasks. Tasks that a less mature engineer may deem beneath their dignity or their job title.
Mature engineers lift the skills and expertise of those around them.
They recognize that at some point, their individual contribution and potential cannot be exercised singularly. They recognize that there is only so much that can be produced by a single person, and the world’s best engineering feats are executed by teams, not singularly brilliant and lone engineers.
Mature engineers make their trade-offs explicit when making judgements and decisions.
They realize all engineering decisions, implementations, and designs exist within a spectrum; we do not live in a binary world. They can quickly point out contexts where one successful approach or solution could work and where it could not. They know that one cannot be both efficient and thorough at the same time (The ETTO Principle), that most projects engineers work on exist on an axis of optimality and brittleness, and that whether the problems they are solving are acute or chronic.
They know that they work within a spectrum of ideal and non-ideal, and are OK with that. They are comfortable with it because they strive to make the ideal and non-ideal in a design explicit. Later on in the lifecycle of a design, when the original design is not scaling anymore or needs to be replaced or rewritten, they can look back not with a perspective of how short-sighted those earlier decisions were, but instead say “yep, we made it this far with it and knew we’d have to extend or change it at some point. Looks like that time is now, let’s get to work!” instead of responding with a cranky-pants, passive-aggressive Hindsight Bias-filled remark with counterfactuals (e.g.. “those idiots didn’t do it right the first time!”, “they cut corners!”, “I TOLD them this wouldn’t work!”)
The tl;dr on trade-offs is that everyone cuts corners, in every project. Immature engineers discover them in hindsight, disgusted. Mature engineers spell them out at the onset of a project, accept them and recognize them as part of good engineering.
Mature engineers don’t practice CYAE (“Cover Your Ass Engineering”)
The scenario where someone will stand on ceremony as an excuse for not attempting to understand how his or her code (or infrastructure) could be touched by other parts of the system or business is a losing proposition. Covering your ass sends the implicit message that you are someone willing to throw others (on your team? in your company? in your community?) under the proverbial bus at the mere hint that your work had any flaw. Mature engineers stand up and accept the responsibility given to them. If they find they don’t have the requisite authority to be held accountable for their work, they seek out ways to rectify that.
An example of CYAE is “It’s not my fault. They broke it, they used it wrong. I built it to spec, I can’t be held responsible for their mistakes or improper specification.”
Mature engineers are empathetic.
In complex projects, there are usually a number of stakeholders. In any project, the designers, product managers, operations engineers, developers, and business development folks all have goals and perspectives, and mature engineers realize that those goals and views may be different. They understand this so that they can navigate effectively in the work that they do. Being empathetic in this sense means having the ability to view the project from another person’s perspective and to take that into consideration into your own work.
Goal conflicts are inherent in all engineering work, and complaining about them (instead of embracing them as requirements for success) is a sign of a less mature engineer.
They don’t make empty complaints.
Instead, they express judgements based on empirical evidence and bring with those judgements options for solving the problem which they’ve identified. A great manager of mine said to never go to your boss with a complaint about anything without at least one (ideally more than one) suggestion for a solution. Even demonstrating that you’ve tried working the problem on your own and came up empty-handed is better than an empty complaint.
Mature engineers are aware of cognitive biases
This isn’t to say that every mature engineer needs to have a degree in psychology, but cognitive biases are what can limit the growth of an engineer’s career at a certain point. Even if they’re not aware of the details of how they appear or how these biases can be guarded against, most mature engineers I know have a level of self-awareness to at least recognize they (like everyone) are susceptible to them.
Culturally, engineers work day-to-day in empirical evidence in research. Basically: show me the data. The issue with cognitive biases is that we can be blissfully unaware of when we are interpreting data with our own brains in ways that defy empirical data, and can have a surprising effect on how we get work done and work on teams.
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Self-Serving Bias: basically, if something is good, it’s probably because of something I did or thought of. If it’s bad, it’s probably the doing of someone else.
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Fundamental Attribution Error: basically: the bad results that someone else got from his work must have something to do with how he is, personally (stupid, clumsy, sloppy, etc.) whereas if I get bad results, it’s because of the context that I was in, the pressure I was under, the situation I was in, etc.
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Hindsight Bias: (it is said that this is the most-studied phenomenon in the history of modern psychology) basically: after an untoward or negative event (a severe bug, an outage, etc.) “I knew it all along!”. It is the very strong tendency to view the past more simply than it was in reality. You can tell there is Hindsight Bias going on when descriptions involve counterfactuals, or “…they should have…”, or “…how did they not see that, it’s so obvious!”.
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Outcome Bias: like above, this comes up after a surprising or negative event. If the event was very damaging, expensive to clean up, or severe, then the decisions or actions that contributed to that event are judged to be very stupid, reckless, or negligent. The judgement is proportional to how severe the event was.
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Planning Fallacy: (related to the point about making estimates under uncertainty, above) basically: being more optimistic about forecasting the time a particular project will take.
“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets credit.” -- This quote is commonly attributed to Harry S. Truman, but it looks like it might have first been said by a Jesuit priest in a different form. In any case, this is another indication you’re working with a mature engineer: they hold the success of the project much higher than the potential praise they may get personally for working on it.