The Key to Distinguishing an Excellent Engineer from an Average One

The key to distinguishing an excellent engineer from an average one, in my opinion, is whether they can make others feel they are reliable.

Making others feel you are reliable is not an easy task. First and foremost, of course, your skills and knowledge must be sufficiently reliable, reliable enough to handle all the big and small issues that come up at work. Whether it's system failures or unexpected system behaviors, you need to be able to solve these problems. However, in my experience, most excellent engineers don't have too much trouble meeting this basic requirement. What differentiates an excellent engineer from an average one is whether you can "make others feel your reliability."

There is actually a huge gap between truly being reliable and making others feel you are reliable, and the most crucial part of the latter is "making others feel it." Achieving this involves many aspects, with the biggest key being whether you can always deliver on promises. Trust between people is built over time and through repeated testing. Whether you actively fulfill the commitments you make, such as completing the tasks you promised each week, changing the behaviors you talked about in your monthly one-on-one, or achieving the goals and actions you set for the quarter, all without being pushed by others. Please don't think that some tasks are too small and that failing to do them won't have any impact. Indeed, it might not significantly impact the company, but your reputation is built on these small accumulated actions. When others don't take your small promises seriously, naturally, they won't trust you to complete more important and urgent tasks either.