Possibly the most brilliant engineer I worked with when I was at PictureTel was named Mark Duckworth. (Last I knew, he was still at Polycom, who baught PictureTel, and is now a Software Architect.) He was brilliant because he had a knack for looking at a software problem and a proposed solution and immediately zeroing in on the hardest problems that needed to be solved or the hardest problems posed by taking the particular solution approach.

Now a lesser engineer of similar brilliance might rake the person presenting their solution over the coals, lambasting them for all of the things they missed and suggesting a lack of ability or attention, but Mark was better than that. What impressed me even more than Mark's clarity of vision was his humility.

Mark started out by honestly assuming that the person across the table was a better software engineer than Mark was. Since he could clearly see that the engineer was convinced that he had a solution, Mark was eager and curious to see how this prodigy across the table had managed to solve all these difficult problems, to discover what he could learn, and he'd be visibly crestfallen to discover that the engineer had in fact not seen or addressed the problems after all. One could imagine someone putting this on as a ruse, but in Mark it was absolutely genuine.

It was impossible to be angry with Mark. It was impossible to be defensive with Mark. But before I went into a design meeting I would struggle to try to see all of the problems and have answers for them, even radically change my design to address them, because I didn't want to disappoint him. His humility made me a much better engineer and left me with a deep desire to model myself on that way of approaching people.

The most powerful thing that any human being can do for another is to believe in him.