Soft skills every developer should master

Bill Michael
Jul 23, 2017 · 3 min read

When people think “Developer”, they’d normally picture a dude in his mom’s basement, bespectacled and chubby with nearly all his time (weird the stereotypes are unusually gender-biased. I know some amazing female developers) spent in front of a monitor spewing fast-moving green words on a dark background. Throw in some chips and junk foods, and boom, you’ve got the perfect description of a programmer/developer. He’s socially awkward, withdrawn and enjoys the geeky things of life. The list of false stereotypes goes on and on.
But that is far from the definition of who a developer/programmer is. The point of this article isn’t to describe to you who a developer is, but to bring to light some of the skills required of a developer if he (or she) desires to thrive.
Being a developer goes beyond writing beautiful codes that work “Magic”. It goes beyond scrapping through Github for open source projects, or StackOverflow for people to shame and questions to answer. As a developer, you want to be able to communicate with your users effectively. A lot of them aren’t interested in the “Jargon” associated with code writing, and they don’t want to have anything to do with it. You want to show empathy because let’s be honest, your primary goal as you write code is to alleviate some sort of problem your users are facing. Below are some of the skills you could work on to become an effective developer:

Communication skills:
Imagine a scenario where users ask you, a developer, why companies like Facebook and Google never mail them their passwords whenever they forget them. You don’t want to go into the nitty-gritty details of how passwords are hashed and salted SHA algorithms before being stored in a database somewhere, which makes it almost impossible for them to ever know what your password is exactly. Your ability to gently enlighten them without much of the tech jargon they have no idea of is a sign of your in-depth grasp of the matter at hand. Communication without Jargon is essential.

Person to person interaction
Believe it or not, your interaction with others, be it a team of developers or your users, matter more than the lines of code you write. If you have a crappy relationship with members of your team, it would derail the quality of work the team delivers. If your relationship with your users is terrible, your product would definitely suffer in the market. You get to make a bigger impact on people with your people skills than with your code alone. So, regardless the quality and quantity of code you end up writing, if you are terrible as a person, you would be a liability to any team or company hiring.

Ask Questions
It is usually said that “Assumption is the lowest form of intelligence”. Ask questions. Relevant questions, as some questions can be downright annoying (pictures of my high school flashing across my mind right now). Anyway, the point is questions are vital. Within your team, ask smart, relevant questions. You query your users; what aspect of the product do you love? What aspect of the product do you completely hate? Sure, there would be a survey team which you most likely won’t be a part of, but it’s one skill you certainly need as a developer.

Remember, with a text editor (or IDE) and a compiler (or interpreter) you can change the world. Don’t let your soft skills be the reason you don’t.

Bill Michael

Written by

A python Developer. Lover of ML and AI. Back-end Junkie

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