5 More Things World-Class Engineers Do That You Don't

More of what the truly elite do differently. Copy them.

Photo by Torsten Dederichs on Unsplash

I keep a running list of what separates world-class engineers from the rest of us. Last week I shared the first five. Here are five more.

But first, one thing worth saying out loud. I am a behavioralist at heart. I believe you are, in the end, what you do.

That belief is the undercurrent beneath everything I write. It is why none of these ten items, last week’s five or this week’s, is about being smarter than the people around you. These engineers are brilliant and they work hard, and I am not pretending otherwise. Brilliance and hard work are table stakes at this level, and almost everyone at the top has already cleared that bar.

But what separates them from the rest is their behavior. Specifically, how they act and react when things get difficult.

That is what you need to copy. Do enough of the same, and you will be well on your way to becoming an elite engineer.

These five elite behaviors show up in how the best carry themselves under pressure. They are subtler than the first batch, and a few of them will sting.

Here they are, with the gap between what world-class engineers do and where most other people stop. If you would add one to this list, drop it in the comments.

1. They collect their scars

Christopher Brown, now a distinguished engineer at NVIDIA, was a founding engineer on EC2. Ask him where real judgment comes from, and he won’t point to a book.

“Smooth seas make poor sailors.”

“Rough seas” are where engineers gain their most valuable experience. Christopher has been through tough challenges, and he has the scars to prove it.

Early on, making firewall changes to the only edge router for EC2, he ran a script by hand and inadvertently locked himself and everyone else out of it. Another time, he dropped a production database table set to autocommit, with no managed backups to lean on.

Sailing through each of these rough seas taught Christopher things that no book or YouTube video ever could.

“You can read about it, you can know it’s the best practice, but until you’ve got the scar, it’s just academic and abstract in your head.”

Here’s the uncomfortable part. Judgment like that comes only from experiencing things going wrong. If nothing you touch ever breaks, you will never collect the scars that harden into experience, and the day something finally does break, you will have nothing to draw on.

Fortunately for you and me, nobody, not even an elite engineer, is perfect. We make mistakes. Things break. The opportunity to develop scars will present itself soon enough. And scars that come from experience are something to seek and be proud of, not to be feared.

We pick up wounds. But those wounds heal, leaving us with scars. And hard-won experience.

And, like a child in the playground proudly showing off her scar, or an old sailor or D-Day war veteran who says nothing but whose body tells the story of his experience, we engineers can be proud of our scars and what they represent.

Carlos, from last week’s list, is a senior principal today largely because of one scar. That Black Friday outage taught him more than any clean launch ever did.

Here’s another uncomfortable truth: The bigger a task’s blast radius, that is, how many things break when it goes wrong, the more the “blast” has to teach you.

What most people do: They avoid high-blast-radius work. In so doing, they avoid opportunities to gain practical knowledge of the things that matter most under pressure.

Do this instead: If there is a hard, higher-stakes task you have been steering around, take it on carefully, and let it teach you. If nothing like that is in front of you, go put yourself closer to where things are more likely to break. Volunteer for on-call, or ask to own the messy, ambiguous project nobody else wants. Winning the scar is the point.

2. They get nervous when the work gets easy

Kun Chen, who reached E7 at Facebook and partner level at Microsoft, told me about a reflex he experiences that I have not heard from anyone else. When his work starts going smoothly, that is exactly when he starts to worry.

“Whenever I have a project that is running well and everything is going smoothly, I panic. I think, why is this going so smoothly? If it will keep going whether I’m here or not, then I’m not adding value.”

That nervousness is a trigger for Kun Chen. It sends him looking for the next hard thing. That is what pushed him from a comfortable senior role at Facebook to a from-scratch games platform at Microsoft, trading a settled project for a harder one.

What most people do: They finally get something stable, and they settle in. No fires and no hard problems feels like proof that they’ve made it. Underneath, they have stopped growing, and they will not notice this until the role outgrows them or the work dries up.

Do this instead: Find the part of your work that has started to feel automatic, the thing you could now do in your sleep. That is your cue to act. Pick something harder, perhaps something you have been avoiding, and start moving in that direction.

3. They earn trust before they spend it

The best engineers are disciplined about a resource that most people overlook: trust. They will not reach for a bold bet or a bigger role until they have banked enough of it to cover the ask.

Carlos Arguelles, a senior principal who has rebuilt himself at Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, laid out the sequence for me. Deliver results consistently until people know you do what you say. That earns you trust, and trust is the currency you spend on bigger swings.

“Trust becomes a currency, social capital you have to use wisely. I’ve seen people who often have great ideas, but they haven’t built the capital yet to cash that in.”

The order matters. Reliability comes first, because that buys you permission to ask for bigger things.

What most people do: They reach for the big thing, a risky project or a seat at the table, before they have earned the necessary trust to support the ask. Then they are surprised when the answer is no.

Do this instead: Name the biggest thing you want to ask for right now, for example, more scope, or a bet nobody else is backing. Before you ask, be honest about how much trust you have banked with the people who decide. If it is thin, spend the next few weeks delivering something small and certain, and make sure they see it land.

4. They make sure it is the right problem

Michael Novati went from intern to principal at Meta in six years. He watched the tools around him become powerful enough to build almost anything, fast.

These conditions, he warns, can lure engineers into a trap.

“A really good solution to the wrong problem is worse than doing nothing.”

When execution is cheap, the expensive mistake moves upstream, to choosing what to build. The best engineers will expend real effort on getting that choice right. This is especially important as AI takes a larger role in creating software.

Optimize a service that gets deprecated next quarter, or ship a polished feature no customer has asked for, and you have produced nothing. No matter how good every commit may have felt along the way.

How do you know you have the right problem?

Two tests. First, someone who matters feels the pain right now. Second, if you quietly did nothing, something real would break.

If the problem cannot pass both tests but you decide to tackle it anyway, you would likely be creating a solution that may be interesting but is, ultimately, unneeded.

What most people do: They jump straight to building, because building feels like progress. Then they find out, too late, that the problem was not worth solving.

Do this instead: Before you sink real time into your next piece of work, write one sentence on why that problem is worth solving right now. Apply the two tests. Let this method guide you to work that is truly worth doing.

5. They organize their career around the work they love

Philip Su earned eight promotions in eight years at Microsoft and reached distinguished engineer at Meta. Then he did something almost nobody does. He took a demotion, from E9 back to E7, so he could get back to writing code.

Philip’s advice to his younger self:

“One day you would be happy to go backwards, because you love the work. So why stress about when you’re going to get there?”

The best figure out what their good days look like and steer themselves toward more of them. For Philip, that meant trading scope and status for the part of the job he loved. The title followed the work, and when it no longer let him dog the work he enjoyed, he let it go.

What most people do: They chase the next level on autopilot, without asking whether they would enjoy doing the things that are required to be done at that level.

Do this instead: Be honest about what you want from your work. What kind of day would you happily repeat? Look at where you are. If your current role already gives you that, give yourself permission to stop chasing the next rung. If it doesn’t give you what you want, steer toward the work that would, and let the title sort itself out.

Remember where this started. You are, in the end, what you do. So, do one of these. Pick the one that made you shift in your seat the most, and put it into practice this week.

Enjoyed this week’s newsletter? Give it a ❤️ so I know to write similar ones in the future.

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One housekeeping note before I sign off. I'll be traveling with my family for the next few weeks, and the newsletter is not going quiet while I'm gone. I've lined up three of the most-read pieces from the archive to run in my absence, one each week, so if you joined recently you'll get some of the best things you missed. I’ll be back with fresh articles when I return.