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What do the best engineers do better?


I’m fascinated by this topic.

I recently found another thread on HN about it What do top engineers you know do that others don’t.

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As always for hacker news, there’s a feisty debate about what such character includes.

Here’s my take.

1. Tackle learning quickly

Whether it means getting up to speed on a new service that AWS has launched, building a new api for an application that has never been built before, or getting up to speed with a new platform. Learning is ongoing.

Top engineers can make this a seemless part of their daily routine. Getting going quickly with new concepts and technologies, means wading into the water at first, to gain the general lay of the land. Now you can talk intelligently about the features, limitations and challenges.

From there he or she can dive in quickly to the specific area required for the project, and move forward with that technology comfortably.

Related: How do I migrate my skills to the cloud?

2. Customer & product perspective

When building code, it’s easy to get mired in libraries, sorting algorithms, and API minutiae. And all of that is very important. But what are you building, and why are you building it?

Understanding your customer, what they do day-to-day is not always easy. It means using the product yourself, and also talking with sales teams regularly to hear what they are hearing.

Then pouring all this into your user stories. For top engineers it will inform their decisions, and help them communicate to product & project managers about what issues their encountering. Tradeoffs about features, coding, performance and technical debt can be better evaluated with more information.

Read: Is Fred Wilson honest about transparency?

3. Dig Deeper

Does your code run slowly? Have you tried to figure out why?

Is it related to:

o latency in production that doesn’t appear our your laptop
o untuned production database queries
o untuned connection pooling
o slow API calls
o weird kubernetes or orchestration issues
o web host issue with memory shortage
o web host issue with slow unoptimized code
o issues on the client side

Top engineers have seen applications slow down or fail in a myriad of ways. This allows them to imagine how a new application might be failing, and investigate those.


4. Great communicators

In startups, your engineers need to communicate to many folks who don’t have an engineering background. Product & UI/UX folks probably are quite technical on their own. But what about sales teams who are dealing directly with customers? Or C-suite folks who watch the business bottom lines, but may not have the same low level technical understanding?

Great communicators can find the right metaphor to explain hurdles and holdups, technical debt, or the latest performance challenges. And explaining those in terms that resonate for others is incredibly valuable to the team and business velocity.

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Also find the author on twitter @hullsean.






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