What Qualities Make a Good Startup Engineer?

* Smart enough to build your product

* Stupid enough to take a huge pay cut for someone else's dream/payday

It would seem that most of the qualities he lists would be useful for engineers at larger companies too, not just startups. For example:

- Systematic debugging skills (Would anyone want to hire an engineer who had haphazard debugging skills?)

- Fearlessness to dive into what you don’t know (Would anyone want to hire an engineer who's afraid of doing new things?)

- A tool-building mindset

- A desire to be a player and not a victim

- Grit, combined with a willingness to learn and retrospect

"A pragmatic attitude toward decision-making"

if (lotsOfEquity) { bePragmaticWhichMeansWriteCrappyCodeFast(); } else { codeTheWayYouEnjoy(); boostYourCv(); }

The ability to deal with large amounts of uncertainty.