10 Reads on Soft Skills for Software Developer

Ian Read
Ian Read
Nov 8 · 3 min read

This blog post won’t make your code run faster, do more features, but I hope it will make developers enjoy working with you a bit more…

To get started, we’ll look at some articles talking about the negative habits of software developers. Then we will have a mid section looking at some of the related psychology behind this behaviour, then we will wrap with some practical exercises.

What’s the point of this?

A study found the best teams in Google were the ones where they had a psychologically safe environment. That is teams where people felt that could safely talk about things without worrying about being judge — i.e. asking stupid questions!

tl;dr — They found that what really mattered was how the team worked together, rather than who is on the team. In order of importance:

  • Psychological safety

Negative Developer Traits

tl;dr — work respectfully with others, don’t get sloppy, don’t insist you’re always right, and learn to communicate what you have done effectively.

tl;dr — get the ego under control!

Psychology 101 — Fundamentals of Asking and Giving Help

I found these two TEDTalks go over some of the pretty fundamental things about how we communicate. They tie into the Google basic premise is that

Practical

If this was a stackoverflow response, this is the bit that has the code to copy and paste for what you want to do…

tl;dr — Julian’s 7 deadly sins of why people may not want to listen to you:

  • gossip/bitching

Julian’s 4 corner stones to stand on. Pretty much summarised as “HAIL” — to greet or acclaim enthusiastically:

Honesty
Authenticity — “be yourself”
Integrity
Love

(I personally want to vom when people use words to stand for things like this, but whatever).

Advice on how to respond to technical questions and discussions:

tl;dr — this is one of my favourite pieces. It’s a thing if you say you have an idea for a start up/open source project/whatever, there are some developers who will go out of their way to think of a reason to dismiss/put it down. Whilst I’m not saying this is always a bad thing, but learning to spot when someone is being helpful (i.e. thankfully someone stopped me before I invested heavily in that chocolate teapots startup), but sometimes people just don’t want you to do something for whatever reasons. Learn to ignore these people :)

tl;dr — get some honest feedback and listen to it!

tl;dr — a great overview of a book that talks about being able to give constructive feedback and inspire. More aimed at managers, but it’s a worth a read if that’s not what you’re into. (Or be lazy and get your line manager to read it, so they can you excited about your work again…)

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