How to be a top 1% developer?

Published in

Frontbench

4 min readDec 17, 2020

I have been asked this question every-time from students that ‘How to be a good developer and secure a top-class career’? Even when I was learning to code, I also used to ask this question to every developer I met and all of them just told me to learn to code.

But is it the only thing you need to be a good developer? Obviously, you need to know how to code well but that doesn’t mean you will become a good developer and now you can secure a high-paying job.

So, what differentiates between a top coder and a naive one? What are the few qualities that land them a high-paying job?

After a little experience and little research (talking to some developers), I have come through some qualities which I find in every top developer and if you lack any one of them then it’s high time you start working on them to be at the top.

Let’s dive soon without wasting much of your time-

Technical skills -

No matter what you do you can never a good developer without the skill. Someone in my early days said to me ‘Coding is like fine art’ and you need to learn it, practice it, and keep working on it for excelling. The more you practice the better it becomes. Remember when we were in school and the teacher used to say practice math daily for at least 1 hour to score good marks the same thing applies to coding also.
To develop great technical skills you need to apply 3P’s rule and that is-

PRACTICE, PRACTICE, AND PRACTICE

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Curiosity -

The ultimate superpower every human have is curiosity. You learn what you are curious about not what others are talking about. It helps you to dig the rabbit hole. And for the developer, it pushes them to ask the right question and learn new skills. ‘Some of the questions good developers ask themselves’ as stated by IBM, CTO -

Is this an efficient way to do this code?
What can I do better and find an easier way to do this?
Curious to always learning a new language
Always experimenting and many more

The key to a better solution is a good question

Positive attitude -

A positive attitude is one of the key qualities of good developers. Attitude defines the character of the developer — a positive attitude lets them look at the difficult problem as a challenge, not a hurdle.

They are positive, willing to go any distance to get the job done — “GET SH*T DONE ATTITUDE”

Team player -

Another superb quality of premium developers is their ability to help other developers get better. They offer teammates help when they are stuck, teach new skills to others and write documentation that would help teammates not only in their organization but the developer community in general

Supreme communication skill -

A good developer is directly proportional to good communication. A good developer is able to understand the problem, break them down, and state them clearly in front of the team. They understand concepts quickly, or ask the right questions to help make them clear, and don’t need to have everything written down in a specifications document.
There is no substitute for communication.

If you practice these above qualities continuously during your process of learning then it will help you to secure a good high-paying job. These are not only qualities you need there are many more but that for some other day.

HAPPY LEARNING, HAPPY GROWING

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Frontbench is an online platform for gen z and millennials to learn digital skills and become employable in technology.

Know more here — https://twitter.com/frontbenchHQ