What distinguishes great software engineers? (2019) [pdf]
Can&#x27;t claim I read the entire thing, but I got down to methodology and must say it doesn&#x27;t look particularly impressive. The study is a survey sent out strictly to Microsoft employees asking them how they rank a set of pre-defined criteria about what makes a great software engineer. That criteria includes things like &quot;hard working&quot;, &quot;honesty&quot;, &quot;team player&quot;, &quot;creates a safe haven&quot; etc...<p>Obviously no Microsoft employee is going to say something like &quot;Lazy liars who treat people like crap make great software engineers.&quot;<p>At the very least you&#x27;d expect a study to have a control group in order to filter out these useless questions. For example send a similarly worded survey to a group of grocery cashiers and ask them if they think attributes such as &quot;Hard work, honesty, integrity, long term thinking, being a team player.&quot; make someone a great engineer.<p>My hypothesis is you&#x27;d end up getting similar answers from taxi drivers as you would from Microsoft employees and consequently that there isn&#x27;t much value derived from this survey or their selection of participants.<p>Anyways, I&#x27;m by no means an expert and could be misjudging this research but frankly it looks to be beyond useless.