[mighty_warrior]

Honestly the section about debugging skills needs to be much higher in the article. Debugging skills are essential to learning legacy applications you are thrown into and understanding how your code works in general. It amazes me when I see an engineer with 5+ years experience who cannot hook up a remote debugger to their application.

My number one observation about productivity usually revolves around how an engineer attacks a problem and handles scope creep. There are some programmers who can get a set of requirements, and like a trained surgeon get in, fix the big bleed and get out. While they are in there they might fix a couple close issues but they are not re-architecting the whole application. Then there are others who see all the problems, they notice this problem there, and that problem here and keep asking what does this all mean and it eventually cripples them. They spend some much time seeing all the problems, that they never get around to solving the one they were tasked to fix.

Once you realize you won't understand it all from the beginning and you can't fix every issue you see. You become a much more effective engineer.