• They'll dream big and push themselves, you and your team towards bigger achievements than you initially thought possible.
• They have a growth mindset. They crave feedback and new challenges that will push them to grow, they persist in the face of setbacks, they see effort as the path to mastery, they learn from critical feedback, and they're inspired and learn from the success of others.
• They make the code they own or touch simpler, clearer, easier to work with and faster to change. They do this out of habit, opportunistically and continuously.

My personal takeaways after ~5 years in the industry:

• The simplicity one is the gift that keeps giving. I’ve seen entire teams move faster and stay happier just because one or two people consistently refactored and clarified as they went. It’s quiet, unglamorous work that compounds massively.
• Helping others be great is the real multiplier. Early in my career I hoarded the hard problems to prove myself; later I realized handing them off (with support) was how I actually scaled my impact.
• The “know what’s valuable” trait has saved me more times than raw technical skill. Shipping the right small thing almost always beats shipping the wrong big thing perfectly.

If you haven’t read it, it’s a quick 6-minute read and still one of the best distillations I’ve seen of what separates good engineers from truly great ones. Highly recommend.

Source: Traits of Exceptional Engineers