Effective technical leaders and mentors share distinct characteristics that separate them from individual contributors. Here are the questions that reveal true leadership.

1. Do You Accumulate Experience or Repeat It?

Repeating: Doing the same work year after year, measuring tenure not growth.

Accumulating: Building new capabilities, taking on broader responsibilities, establishing feedback loops for yourself and your team.

Leaders are builders—they create opportunities for others while advancing their own skills. Even when focused on code, they enable team growth.

2. “It Works” vs. “Is This Good?”

Everyone starts with “it works because it’s not broken.” Juniors stay there. Seniors evolve.

Key distinction: Taking accountability for code quality after deployment. Leaders continuously ask “Is this good?” even when everything seems fine. They seek questions they don’t yet know to ask.

Quality isn’t the absence of complaints—it’s the presence of standards.

3. Quality Approves vs. Approval Is Quality

Just because no one flagged your code doesn’t mean it’s quality work. Just because it shipped doesn’t mean it’s right.

Leaders maintain standards independent of external validation. They critique their own work, seek improvement opportunities, and build systems that reward quality over mere completion.

4. Do You Build Others to Build Better Products?

This is foundational. We learn by teaching.

Are you mentoring less experienced engineers to do what you do? Not as a nice-to-have, but as core responsibility? This creates space for your own growth—as they take your current work, you tackle what your leaders do.

Leadership multiplier: Great engineers solve hard problems. Great leaders create engineers who solve hard problems.

The Bottom Line

Leadership in software development isn’t about titles—it’s about:

  • Continuous growth over comfortable repetition
  • Quality standards over “it works”
  • Building others as you build systems
  • Accountability that extends beyond deployment

These characteristics compound over careers, creating engineers who don’t just write code—they elevate teams and organizations.