Virtues

Put your ego aside

You are never the top authority on any subject. Always check prior art and defer to experts, because technology is always evolving and you are never done learning.

Be open-minded to input from less experienced engineers. Inexperience can be a third eye, as the inexperienced lack preconceptions about how things should work and are sensitised to things that feel wrong and unintuitive. If the junior has trouble with onboarding, maybe it's the process that's faulty and not the junior.

Think for yourself

Don't be swayed by thought leaders. Just because an idea is pushed by famous people working at a famous company doesn't automatically make it a good one. Assess the idea on its merits alone, and bear in mind any possible ulterior motives behind it.

Don't blindly depend on LLMs. LLMs can easily send you on a wild goose chase, fixating on the wrong detail or peddling misconceptions found in their training data. Come up with a hypothesis by yourself and use the LLM to probe it – if you surrender the responsibility of problem analysis, your skills will begin to rot.

No problem is unsolvable

Every problem has a cause, and you can find it. You might not know how to read that programming language or attach that debugger or build that source, but every skill is learnable.

Don't run away from the problem. If there is an expert available, don't defer the task to them; make use of them and add their expertise to your own.

Don't be tempted by workarounds. Workarounds often just trade a known problem for one or more unknown ones. Solving the problem at the source will always reduce the complexity.

Unblock your teammates

It's a major productivity killer to be blocked on someone else, but bear in mind that it goes both ways. If you lead a good example for others, you create an environment that will encourage others to do the same for you in return. So jump on those PR reviews, provision that infrastructure, send out those invites, and prioritise your team above yourself.

Be careful not to take it to the extreme, though. The worst-case scenario is that you spend all day unblocking everyone else and never get any of your own work done. All the more tragic if they get recognised for their swift productivity this quarter whilst you get overlooked despite having facilitated it all.

The middle ground is to set expectations. Be predictable in how much time you can offer each day (e.g. one review in the morning, another in the afternoon). Weigh up the importance of a request against your own deliverables. Block out time to guarantee your own work.

But above all, communicate your needs. Sometimes, you'll have a task that requires prolonged concentration, or you'll be in a situation where context-switching is expensive. Consider your own limitations and be prepared to decline requests. Just give a heads-up whenever possible, so that the team can adjust accordingly.