

Ask HN: What is a good software engineer? - julien421

What is a good software engineer? I have been debating this with many of my friends and everyone seems to have a different point of view. What do you think?
======
lsiunsuex
A good software engineer is a person that's good at thinking logically, can
communicate what they're thinking and is capable of doing the research to
implement an idea.

Every week, theres articles here about writing in a new framework, language,
whatever. They're great to play with and sometimes fun to learn, but a good
engineer doesn't know 50 languages / frameworks. I don't care if you know 2,
so long as if I explained a set of requirements for a feature or program, that
you can see the end goal and do it, or spend some time, learn a language /
framework that can do it, and then do it.

Sometimes, that ability to execute comes from playing with those new
frameworks / languages, and for sure, every programmer / engineer has they're
preferences, agenda, etc... but a good engineer should roughly be aware that
now a'days, there is no "i can't", only "how long is it gonna take to figure
it out and what will it cost".

a great engineer is a pro at using search engines and asking the right
question. The answer is out there, you just need to break the bigger problem
down into smaller problems, formulate your question properly, and find the
answer in a timely manor.

(2 cents)

