[roenxi]

To anyone in a similar situation; you might want to spend some time reflecting on the reality of your role - one of the failure modes of incompetence is using "care" as a proxy for "ability" because an incompetent person almost by definition can't assess ability directly. I fell for that once and consider myself lucky that I figured out what I was doing wrong while still a fresh-faced graduate.

The ideal engineer is not emotionally involved in their work. They aren't shareholders; they don't reap the benefits of what they do, they don't control the direction of the company. They are there to achieve specific technical goals with professionalism. Bringing emotion or non-technical factors in to the deal is an obstacle to excellence.

[crispyambulance]

   The ideal engineer is not emotionally involved in their work.

As much as some may profess to actually believe that it simply isn’t even close to true.

I am sure there are some unicorn exceptions (like the Spock character from Star Trek) but those who are excellent at their work also put a lot of time and effort into it, if not continuously then they’ve at least paid their dues for a span of decades. However they got there it represents a significant emotional investment involving pride and care or even a kind of love.

One can’t know everything all the time. There are ALWAYS going to be gaps in your own ability especially when you’re doing new and difficult work, and the way to bridge those gaps is to be driven by a desire to overcome them— in other words by CARING enough to keep trying.

The most successful people I can think of personally always care enough to overcome gaps in their ability. It looks like incompetence at first, then it becomes obsession, then it becomes problem solving, and it is ends with mastery, IF they CARE enough.

[roenxi]

Maybe. But if someone is a junior employee they aren't going to be able to identify all the specific tells for that. I know a passionate engineer who's meeting presence can often be mistaken for someone that is half asleep. He doesn't have a lot of respect for meetings and doesn't engage much. Would a junior engineer in that meeting identify that his dozey lids, slack jaw and mastery of simple programming conceal a burning passion for the art of great software? I'd bet not. You need to be quite good at programming to properly assess what is going on.

[bruce343434]

I disagree that blindly executing like a robot is excellent. A truly excellent product happens when people go above and beyond, and think of the little yet related things, instead of doing everything literally and exactly as told and not giving a shit about the end result.