Actually, not only humble. Responsible. Passionate. Pragmatic.
This article is genuinely my opinion, shaped by working with dozens of engineers across different companies and projects. Nobody paid me to write this, unfortunately.
I know it is not a very popular one right now. Yes, the system is broken. But why should we spend all our time complaining about it? We can still build ourselves, grow, and become better despite its flaws.
Professionals still need to stay professionals. And if you love and believe in what you do, it becomes much easier to overcome difficulties with a clear conscience.
One-by-one.
Humble
They are humble because they are self-confident. They do not need to show off. They know their strengths and weaknesses. They do not feel insecure because they do not see themselves as absolute experts. They remain lifelong learners. They know there is always more to learn and do not expect themselves to reach some final state of perfection.
They learn SOLID, design patterns, and best practices not to show off in front of junior developers during a meeting (real case). They learn SOLID, design patterns, and best practices to build maintainable systems, so other engineers do not have to suffer from spaghetti code.
They are team players. They help other engineers not because there is a ticket for it or because someone asked them to, but because they genuinely want to help. They share knowledge, explain things, and support people around them. They do not act superior just because they know something another engineer does not.
They may not be the ones shouting the loudest about themselves, but they deliver real results and make a genuine contribution.
Responsible
Everyone makes mistakes. But very few people truly take responsibility for their mistakes. Even the best engineers make mistakes. But they respond to them and learn from them, instead of blaming someone or something else. They don't need excuses.
They analyze and prepare before starting something they are not confident in. They understand the risks and know how to mitigate them.
They have a strong sense of ownership. If something is their responsibility, they do not wait for someone else to push them. They will stay two hours longer to meet a deadline, sacrifice some of their time to keep the result good, or fix a production bug at 2 AM without anyone asking them.
They know when a quick response is required and when something can wait. They understand the balance and do not treat every situation as equally urgent.
Passionate
They do not pass a certification just to get a promotion. They pass it because they want to get better at a new technology.
They do not learn Rust because it is popular and looks good on a resume. They learn Rust because they genuinely want to understand it, build something with it, and contribute to the developer community.
They invest in what they build. They care about the result, and they want it to work well.
They do not wait two weeks for the DevOps engineer to come back from vacation. Why not learn Kubernetes?
“But I’m a backend developer, not a DevOps engineer.”
So what? We step out of our comfort zone, learn how to scale pods, and fix Ingress for the umpteenth time. It is interesting. And if we can solve the problem ourselves, who could do it better than us?
You can apply the same mindset to anything you are passionate about.
And I assure you, by the end of it, you will be proud of yourself.
Pragmatic
They do not rush to learn every new framework. They do not tell everyone that AI will replace engineers and immediately start building agent loops around everything.
They read books. They build deep knowledge instead of trying to learn every possible programming language and every new tool that appears.
Instead of adding Elasticsearch immediately, they will first dig into PostgreSQL and check whether its full-text search is already enough. Instead of connecting a Redis cluster, they will look at the query planner and understand why the query is slow.
Yes, this is boring. Nobody wants to sell you “use the database you already have.” But very often, it works better and scales better.
Pragmatic engineers do not add complexity to avoid making hard decisions. They understand the system well enough to build something that does not need unnecessary compromises in the first place.
What do you think? Share your thoughts.
