#8 Signs of a Rockstar Engineer 💫
Five Traits That Businesses Often Look For in Software Engineers
After working in the industry for a while, you start to notice and appreciate certain traits in individuals that contribute to a healthy work environment, and also a high-performing team (for the online gamers out there, think of them as “game carriers”!). These individuals, whom I’d like to call “Rockstars”, can be found in every business, and I’ve had the privilege of working with a few—and I absolutely loved it.
In this post, I’ll be focusing specifically on the Rockstar engineers and share five key traits that businesses often look for.
1. Strong Problem Solver
You might think I’m referring to solving all the Hard LeetCode questions and being able to invert binary trees and reverse linked lists in your sleep. Nope, that’s not what I mean. Here, problem-solving refers to solving business problems, not coding problems. Some engineers believe the latter is their path towards seniority, but it’s actually the former that brings more value to the company, enables them to deliver impactful work, and ultimately leads to promotion.
If you can provide value to your users and solve their problems, that’s powerful. Figuring out the technical aspects (i.e. the how) is a skill that comes with knowledge and experience, which you are already acquiring at work.
Consider this analogy: You focus on "breaking through" a business problem, collect new skills (yay!), and then move on to break through the next business problem, and so on. Now imagine if, instead, you focused solely on acquiring skills without knowing where to apply them on the current business problem. Nay, right?
Rockstar engineers sharpen both their technical skills and their business skills.
When Rockstar engineers train their “problem-solving muscle”, they learn to be quick at (1) identifying the most critical issues and (2) designing effective solutions that can be delivered with minimal friction. This skill comes with repeated training (like gym reps!). The more business problems you solve, the more patterns and ideas you develop for solving future challenges.
Similar to practicing on LeetCode! When you encounter a Linked List problem several times, you start recognising a pattern (e.g. Fast-Slow Pointers) to solve it. Now, let's apply that mindset to businesses instead:
What’s our shortest path to deliver solution X to client Y?
How can we reduce the response time of X for customers?
Which feature should we build next?
What metrics should we care about to measure user success?
And so on.
Why not treat Business Problems like LeetCode Problems? BizCode Problems!
Rockstar engineers focus on solving BizCode, not LeetCode.
2. Great Communication
Rockstar engineers aren’t just great coders—they’re also great communicators. They know how to articulate the technical challenges to relevant stakeholders with the right level of detail, without creating too much noise. They are comfortable sharing new ideas, challenging thoughts, and, more importantly, defining the scope of large complex projects and initiatives.
Communication is key, and its value only increases as you move up the ladder!
Rockstars can comfortably use different mediums for communication (managing team meetings, writing design documents, reviewing Pull Requests (PRs), etc.). They may not have the full strength in all areas, but they generally know how to communicate both efficiently and effectively.
3. Adaptive
According to Oxford’s definition, adaptability means:
Able to change when necessary in order to deal with different situations.
Put Rockstar engineers on a new project, a new team, or even a new org, and they will happily find their way through. They are highly adaptable in constantly changing environments (making them a great fit for startups where uncertainty is a common companion). They can adapt to organisational changes, new product requirements, or even shifts in technical resources. It might take some time, but they’ll get there.
Scenario: We need to run our software in a containerised solution (i.e. Kubernetes). - Has any of us worked with Kubernetes before?
— No problem, we’ll figure that out.
Rockstar engineers will always carve out a path to the finish line. Put them in any team, and you’ll soon hear people praising their work!
4. Team Empowerment
Rockstar engineers know that they can go fast solo, but cannot get that far. They understand that their success heavily relies on their team’s success. One of their best behaviours is involving their colleagues on engineering discussions, and making sure that less-experienced engineers never feel stupid or excluded. This doesn’t mean they aren’t mentoring them; rather, they have the patience and empathy to support them through their learning journey and encourage them to share ideas and feel welcome.
Common statements that Rockstar Engineers often use are:
Hey, would you like to give a demo to feature X that you’ve been working on? People would love to see it live!
Hey, great work on merging this change! This will make our release process much easier now moving forward.
Don’t worry about the broken deployment. Would you like to hop in a call and fix this together?
I found this great article that explains X if you’re interested to give it a read.
What do you think about this new proposal? I’d like to get your thoughts on this.
When junior engineers demonstrate growth and feel empowered to make small decisions regularly and support one another, it indicates that someone has invested in their development. Rockstar engineers are the driving force behind their teams. They praise their teammates, share valuable and actionable feedback. They publicly acknowledge hard work of their teammates to leadership, and take responsibility if something goes wrong.
They give junior engineers the confidence boost they need, which leads to the team being praised by the wider team and fostering talent—all thanks to the Rockstars behind it!
5. Can-do Attitude
One of the best traits a colleague can have is a “can-do” attitude. Demonstrating ownership and accountability are key qualities of a Rockstar engineer and valuable traits for growing engineers.
These qualities are often reflected in statements like:
Let me take care of X / I’ll investigate X.
I got this / I’ll fix this.
Let me think about X offline and come back to you.
I can confidently tell you that people who respond to incidents or problems with this mindset are quickly noticed by their managers.
Leadership sees you, and they appreciate having you!
Poll time! 💡
Conclusion
Now that we’ve talked about Rockstar engineers and how valuable they are, are these traits hard to learn? Definitely not. I’m sure you’re already exhibiting some or all of them. But it’s good to know that people and businesses often appreciate these qualities. I always enjoy working with Rockstar engineers because they drive company growth, reduce employee turnover, and foster healthy team collaboration.
I like to think myself of this Rockstar engineer:
And these are the five traits of a Rockstar Engineer.
Let me know if I missed any trait down below! ⬇️
This is incredibly helpful and relatable, not just for engineers but for professionals across various industries. The insights you have shared provide a fresh perspective on problem-solving and efficiency. Thank you for delivering such valuable content that resonates across the board!
Great read! Would also use "Team Empowerment" to highlight how rockstar engineers make people around them better. Not just by encouragement; but by showing them better ways of doing things..."teaching them how to fish", etc..