What makes a developer a top performer?

As CTO one of my main concerns is to ensure my team is balanced.

This is not a straightforward task. You need to ensure everyone in the team has the correct abilities for it and usually you cannot hire a developer that has the best skills in every area.

Let’s say you have one developer that is a star in backend and not so good at frontend. Even if the team does full stack tasks does his abilities make him a worst developer? The answer is no. Your team should act as a whole, so the developers should have skills that compliment each other.

Ok, but how can I know a developer is better than others in order to configure the best possible team?

As we stated before, focusing on individual skills like the knowledge of a particular framework or being better in frontend or backend is not enough to say whether a developer is better than others. This is why you need to evaluate the impact a developer makes in the company.

Evaluating impact

First of all we need to define what impact means in our contexts. Here I refer to impact as how a developer applies hardskills and softskills to solve business problems.

So we are not talking about the level of expertise in a particular framework or programming language. It’s more related to how you use the set of tools you know and how you can learn to use new ones.

When it comes to software developers, the impact can be evaluated by paying attention to a set of skills that are improved as a developer gets more seniority. I like to evaluate this four categories:

• technical skills
• business awareness
• teamwork
• ability to communicate with non technical people

Technical skills

A developer should be able to code all features that business requires. But it’s not enough, they need to comprehend basic aspects of technology, that means to master what is happening behind the scenes.

They are required to be able to learn new programming languages, frameworks, etc. in a matter of weeks, they should be able to choose the correct tool for the task in order to save time and money, and to do that they need to keep up with the latest tech trends.

These abilities related to hardskills are improved as long as a developer gets senior during their professional life.

Business awareness

When it comes to business awareness we are talking about the willingness a developer has to know business details like why business logic is defined as is, how business operates, what processes take place in their particular domain and what problems they can help to solve. This set of softskills are very important to ensure a developer is developing a feature efficiently.

Business awareness is closely related to technical debt because if a developer doesn’t understand how a feature affects the future of the business it’s not able to foresee future changes in code to make it more maintainable.

Teamwork

Teamwork is crucial for any role that are part of a team and developers are not an exception. The willingness to participate in agile ceremonies, the readiness to help other colleagues or the availability to mentor junior developers are things that fit inside this category. These abilities are signs of a senior developer.

If a developer uses his skills to help the team, the business improves because we get better outcomes from the process.

Communication with non technical people

The ability to communicate with non technical people is the base to link the two sides of the coin in companies nowadays. Only top developers are able to translate technical constraints to business problems efficiently.

Communicating effectively allows a developer to get feedback and help from both technical and non technical people to analyze a particular problem from different perspectives and get the best and fastest solution for the business.

Conclusions

As a brief summary we could say that good developers stand out based on how they apply their skills.

It’s ok to evaluate individual skills but it’s more important to ensure we get a balance based on categorized skillset like: technical skills, business awareness, teamwork and the ability to communicate with non technical people.

You can improve technical skills easily but others like problem solving, communication or business understanding, are more difficult or even impossible.

This is why you need to know the level of these areas as soon as possible to know the best developers in your team. Without any doubt they are making your company better.