I think the ability to be pragmatic, and make technical decisions with nuance and taking context into consideration is the sign of a quality engineer. _Everything_ is a tradeoff in engineering, and experience simply gives you more signals to know when and which tradeoffs to make.
If one can also be humble, and take other opinions into consideration, then that's someone I enjoy working with. I strive to be this person towards others.
100% agree. And the context is not only what you build but also who you are working with. A team with high turnover to it and a founder with 2-3 engineer should prop have diffrent ways of doing things, and there is a lot of business context that people are missing. A lot of code do not need to scale or be extended and may be thrown away or stopped worker on in just a few years. And we we as a industry's has gone to far in many places thinking about good code. Its highly dependent on the context
If one can also be humble, and take other opinions into consideration, then that's someone I enjoy working with. I strive to be this person towards others.