Great digital experts to work with

I had and continue to have the privilege to work with great colleagues. How do you know, though, that your colleague is great? I was thinking a lot, tried to remember the best or smartest solutions anyone came up with.

Actually, I could not. I found rather different memories in me, of those great to work with, a few qualities you may not have thought of at first try, these stood out for me.

• Great attention to detail, consequences, thirst for clarification: reading and understanding specs, code, especially if written by someone else, asking even the not-smart questions, actually realising questions had to be asked, when you know more, you recognize more possibilities and you need to ask more questions to clarify.
• Firmly, passionately, respectfully argue about their approaches: a healthy debate that progresses our common cause we are in the room for, that what every geek appreciates. Keep your ego out of it, keep mine in check and out of it too and we both learn and grow. And our solution will be stronger because it borns out of two or more minds.
• Adept prioritization beyond personal tasks, understanding opportunity costs: everything has a cost. The best engineered solutions avoiding all the edge-cases and giving correct answers in every possible scenarios have a cost too. The time to deliver them. Appreciate the engineers who think of business value too. Is it worth the dozens of hours of solution, the triple server costs, so a 1 in a hundred thousand chance of double notification is avoided? May be, if the notification causes a problem, like double deduction of funds. Otherwise, not so much.
• Being consistent personalities, do as planned or communicate transparently: I always arrive on time for meetings, calls, and communicate early if there is a chance I may not make it. I believe time is our most precious resource and taking away time from someone else for nothing constitutes "stealing”. So I highly appreciate when people do as they said, when they have the foresight and care toward their colleagues. This one thing avoids a large amount of waste we experience during work. And there are way more how this single concept, being consistent can manifest itself.

Would add “know how to learn”, if I would not think that would be a duplication.

These of course my opinion, personal preference of what builds trust for me.

Developing these qualities is a long and hard process. It is attainable for anyone. Learning a specific technical skill, coding in a specific language, configuring a specific server type, is easier.

What do you consider a trait of a great colleague, an amazing team member?