A CTO shares three non-technical traits that matter most for engineering careers: ownership, drive for continuous improvement, and making teammates better. He looks for engineers who volunteer for hard problems, propose improvements, and share knowledge freely.
There's a common misconception in the engineering industry that technical skills are what differentiate engineers between them. Either a person who knows more programming languages, frameworks, or has experience building various different projects. While technical skills certainly are important, but what really makes a big difference to me is, is something different. I value attitude and mindset over technical skills when I'm recognizing the potential. In my career, I grew from an engineer all the way to CTO and have hired over 100 engineers for my teams. And in this video, I'll be sharing my top 3 traits for recognizing the potential in engineers. So my top traits for recognizing potential in engineers have nothing to do with technical skills. They have everything to do with the attitude and the mindset. I'll tell you why. With the right attitude and the mindset, you can learn all of the necessary technical skills needed. And not just that, you are a great person to work with and you're making others around you better because of it. That's very important because As a manager, I am looking for people who will be able to inspire others, help others grow, not just contribute with their technical knowledge. Remember, if you get better at coding for 20%, you will provide 20% more value. But if you help 5 other people get 20% better, you will provide a lot more value. So let's get to my top 3 traits for recognizing the potential in engineers next. So these are the top 3 traits that I am assessing. The first one is sense of ownership and responsibility. The second one is drive and motivation to improve. And the third is being a team player and making others around them better. I believe that with these 3 traits you can be great engineer. Also, not just that, you can be good at anything you put your mind into. Let's go straight to the first one. The first one is sense of ownership and responsibility, and this is how I recognize it. The first sign is that they're volunteering for projects when nobody wants to take initiative. There are always recurring issues coming up and they may be hard to tackle. The person that will tackle them and put in the effort to resolve them will provide a lot of value to the team and overall organization. My second indicator is that they are making suggestions for improvements and then they take initiative to implement them as well. It shows that an engineer wants to make things better across the whole team, organization, and not just focus on their tasks. The third sign is that they are proactive. They don't wait for tasks to be assigned to them, but they're proactively searching for the most impactful thing to work on. Also, they don't need detailed requirements, but they can tackle the problem and find the best solution to it via communicating with with the right people. And the fourth sign is that they are the one who actually writes down the plan when the team is discussing about it. That's very important because it shows to me that the person actually was able to gather all opinions together and formulate a plan which the whole team agreed upon. Now let's go to the second trait, that is the drive and motivation for improving. What's great about our industry is that there's always something new to learn. Great engineers are continuous learners and they understand how important self-improvement is. The first indicator for me is that they are passionate about new technology or new concepts. You can just feel talking with them that they really like what they're doing, and they're always on the lookout for how they can improve their knowledge and skills. That kind of behavior is contagious, and everyone in the team naturally becomes more prone to learning new things. The next one is that they're regularly sharing their knowledge with others. They love to do good code reviews, and they are teaching, helping others, and also sharing their knowledge. They're happy to organize a learning session for the team. The third one is that they like to read or listen. They're always looking for a new book to read or conference to attend in order to learn and improve. And the fourth one is that they like to write. They're either writing a personal blog or a newsletter. It tells me that they love sharing their knowledge and helping others grow as well, especially because they are taking their own personal time to do it. Now let's go to the last trait, and that is that they are a team player and they are making others around them better. I like to say that great teams build great software, not individuals. So being a great team player is very, very important to me. First indicator is that they have the give-first mentality. They understand that great relationships start with giving first. They're always looking for ways to help others, and they're offering their help when they see people in need. The second one is that they're always thinking what's going to be best for the team. They're not just blindly building things based on requirements, but they really want to understand the problem, the motivation behind it, and find the solution that will provide the most value for the team and for the overall organization. The third one is that others like working with them. They like to help and support others, and they're also able to inspire. Others feel like they're growing around them, so they naturally like to work with them as well. And the last one is that they put effort into building good relationships with people in the team and overall organization. They understand how important good relationships are and how much easier it is to collaborate with people when you have been able to build great relationships. With them. I'm curious to hear what are your top traits for recognizing the potential in engineers. Make sure to share that in the comments. To learn more, you can subscribe to my newsletter. It's called Engineering Leadership, where I share similar tips and advice on how to be a great engineering leader. There are more than 100,000 people already reading it, and I publish 2 new articles every week. Thank you for watching, and I'll see you on the next one.
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