[thisjustinm]

Strongly agree with this list. Communication, communication, communication.

When I'm hiring for my remote team I look for communication skills as #1. It's much easier to mentor or get training for someone who lacks some particular technical skill than it is to get someone to pick up a different style of communication.

And to address the other reply saying that 2 and 3 are opposite of each other (even though arkadiytehgraet's tone is mean-spirited I think it deserves clarification) - self-starter is not necessarily about _knowing_ but rather _doing_. An example would be a developer who comes to me and says, "I started working on task X and noticed that it could have an effect on how we store things in the DB so I went and talked to Bob since he's the most knowledgable there and we came up with solution Y and I wanted to run it by you before I start since it differs slightly from what was outlined in the task and may have several other ramifications..."

In this example the developer has taken the lead on their task without relying on constant hand holding or specific direction and has come back with a well thought out and researched solution and _now_ they have some questions.

Put another way, self-starters can take vague or partially defined tasks and come back with a well defined task and lots of questions (which are often the _result_ of the process they went through to better define the task).