What Skills Makes a Great Software Engineer?

Being a software engineer requires you to have many skills. In my career, I’ve had the pleasure of working with people from different parts of the world. They’ve all had diverse backgrounds and experiences 🌎. Some of them I’ve enjoyed working with, and some of them I have not.

Skills That Make a Great Software Engineer

Recently I’ve been thinking about why I like working with some more than others. I enjoy working with engineers who have these skills:

• 🙂 Friendly and easy to communicate with
• 👂 Listen to others and try to see things from other perspectives
• ✍️ Thorough in their work
• 👫 Team player, striving to put the team first
• 💪🤙 Strong opinions, loosely held
• 👩‍🏫 Wants to learn
• 🙋 Asks a lot of questions

As you can see these are all soft skills. Who would you rather work with? Someone who’s not that great of a programmer, but working to be, and is a team player. Or someone who’s a “rockstar programmer” and doesn’t listen to others?

There’s an overflow of articles and blog posts about how to improve your technical skills. They are useful and you should read them, but the soft skills are at least as important, if not more! Technical skills are easy to learn. Soft skills take time and might not come naturally (speaking from personal experience).

So now I’m curious, what skills do you think makes a great software engineer? 😊

Want to learn my 5 favorite habits for an engineer? See this post.

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Originally published at prplcode.dev