Thread by @lefticus

There seems to be some confusion lately about what makes a great engineer and who you want to help you start up your organization.

There are really great engineers, and if you find one, you should try to keep them around.

They have these traits:

1. A great engineer sets up the project for success. They are concerned about tooling and reproducible builds. From the beginning of a project a great engineer has CI, static analysis, runtime analysis, source control, automated testing and anything else they can think of.

2. A great engineer may have a highly customized dev environment. They might use an IDE, (Neo) VIM, or Emacs. They might have their fonts zoomed 300%, or they might have 300 column wide screens.

But they definitely have a setup that lets them work well with the rest of the team.

3. A great engineer trusts their tools. Warnings are turned as high as possible. New tools are found and used that help maintain code quality.

They know this is important because it helps communicate expectations to the rest of the team. And CI keeps things in check.

4. A great engineer doesn't reinvent the wheel on each project. They prefer to use existing libraries and know when the rare case is to create their own libraries.

They probably even have some kind of package manager in use to enable reproducible builds (see #1).

5. A great engineer is a good communicator. They are able to clearly articulate to the rest of the team why certain decisions are made. Or if they cannot communicate it themselves they share resources that communicate the point.

6. A great engineer takes time to take care of themselves. They understand that mental and physical health are important. They know that productivity decreases drastically during crunch times and try to avoid them.

7. A great engineer takes time to learn and is concerned about making sure the rest of the team learns. They take the lead in bringing in training, attending conferences and doing daily / weekly education times with the team.

8. A great engineer listens to the rest of the team and makes sure that their concerns are addressed and proper credit is given for accomplishments and ideas.

9. A great engineer can be anyone from any background.

If you find one of these great engineers, awesome! Do what you can to hold on to them. LISTEN TO THEM.

And train the rest of the team to become great engineers too!

With this definition ALMOST ANYONE who is WILLING TO LEARN can become a great engineer.

Find, train, teach, keep these people. Help everyone become great engineers and you've set your company up for long-term success.

This is much more important than getting the project done as fast as possible just to meet some VC requirements.