How I Judge an Engineer: It's All About Depth

The difference between good and great engineers isn’t what they know - it’s how they figure out what they don’t know.

The Question That Reveals Everything

After having a fair bit of experience building software and working with dozens of engineers across startups and established companies, I’ve developed a simple heuristic for evaluating technical potential. It’s not about years of experience, prestigious companies, or even the complexity of projects they’ve worked on.

It’s about how deep they go when they encounter something they don’t understand.

This single trait tells me more about an engineer’s potential than any algorithm quiz or system design interview ever could.

The Mentor Gap: Why Every Developer Needs a Guide

Or: How I learned the hard way that experience can’t be googled.

The Confident Beginner

When I started as my software journey, I thought I had it all figured out. Documentation was my teacher, Stack Overflow was my mentor, technical blogs were my friends and GitHub was my university. Every problem had a solution somewhere online, every concept could be learned through tutorials, every framework mastered through practice.

I was wrong about a lot of things.

Don’t get me wrong - being self-taught taught me invaluable skills. I learned to dig deep, to understand systems from first principles, to not be afraid of diving into unknown codebases. But there’s a crucial difference between learning how to code and learning how to build a career in software development.

The Journey: From Chaos to Clarity

A reflection on 9 years of software development, mistakes made, lessons learnt, and understanding what is important.

The Beginning: Flying Solo

I started my career as a junior developer like most! However, we do have to talk about what counts as developer from one of the thousands of engineering colleges in India. What do you mean, learning how data structures work? What do you mean, learning how to write code? What do you mean, learning how to debug?

Just memorize the syntax and the algorithms and you are good to go! No wonder, we have the most engineering graduates but few who understand the fundamentals.