Most important quality for developer? Flexibility.

Simple but important thought I want to share. A lot of new developers think that it’s enough to learn one or two programming languages, and then you basically get a job for the rest of your life. Maybe it was true 10–20 years ago, but not in modern world. Here’s why.

Technical reasons for flexibility

First, programming languages and frameworks come and go.
Example from PHP market: CodeIgniter was the most popular framework only 5 years ago, and now it has lost all followers in favor of new leaders — Symfony and Laravel. Similar story with Zend Framework.
Perhaps even better example is JavaScript frameworks — the trends change literally every year!

And even within the same language/framework: there are always new versions, new ways to achieve same things, new packages to use, new architectural patterns to apply etc. There’s always a need to improve and be flexible. Don’t stick to one technology, always keep looking around for the next trends. If you don’t — in 5 years you might be totally out of job market.

Business reasons for flexibility

One of the things that developers hate about clients and managers is that they keep changing their minds, changing the scope of work, making the developers re-write the code quite often. That sucks, I know.

Of course, if that’s extra work, you need to charge for it, but in general — you need to deal with how modern business works. It’s constantly changing, new players appear out of the blue (PokemonGo, anyone?), and businesses have to adapt to the changes. So do you. Deal with it.

What you can do is ask and understand the reasons behind the changes. If you are on the same page with your client in terms of their business goals, you will adapt easier and be flexible.

After all, it’s a team effort, right?