Top 5 Soft Skills for Software Developers
What are Soft Skills?
Soft skills are non-technical skills. They include how you interact with your coworkers, how you solve conflicts, how you prioritize your work, and how you manage your emotions.
Why Are Soft Skills Important For You?
Nearly all development jobs require developers to engage with their peers or clients in some way. You may be excellent with your technical skills but if you can’t communicate well with your peers, and if you can’t manage your time well, then it won’t help you excelling your career.
Think from managers and HR perspective for new hirings or promotions. If they have to make a choice between one of the following, what choice would they make?
- A highly skilled candidate/employee who communicates well, looks emotionally intelligent, and is instantly likable
- An equally skilled candidate/employee who is anti-social and lacks soft skill
The choice is so obvious. So just having technical skills is not sufficient. It’s important to have soft skills to get hired and then excel in your career.
Top 5 Soft Skill for Software Developers
Let’s see what are the top 5 soft skills for software developers:
1. Communication
As a software developer you may be spending several hours working alone on a development task. But you are very rarely coding the entire system on your own. Most of the time, you are working as part of a team that includes business analysts, quality assurance engineers, scrum masters, project managers, code reviewers, technical managers and other stake holders.
Two type of communication skills are important for software developers:
- Verbal Communication: All the time, software developers have to listen to the dev requirements being relayed to them in different meetings: backlog grooming sessions, daily stand ups, QA sessions, retrospectives e.t.c. So it is important that you should be able listen effectively and comprehend that discussion. Associated with this is to ask the right relevant questions, give your feedback on a proposed solution, or even suggest a better solution. All this needs excellent verbal communication skills.
- Written Communication: As a software developer you have to do written communication too. Doing technical documentation, collaborating on confluence, reading and replying to Slack or Teams channel messages, and replying to emails e.t.c. Having good written communication skills makes sure that people may understand what you actually want to say.
2. Time Management
You are in sprint planning meeting and have been asked for time estimation of your tasks. You use your experience and best judgement skills for time estimation and share the time, and now clocks starts ticking.
To achieve your goals, you need to properly plan your day. Try to divide your tasks into smaller tasks and use Pomodoro Technique to plan your day.
The technique is simple:
- Divide you tasks into smaller tasks
- Divide your whole day into short time increments and periodic breaks
- Work for 25 mins, and then take a 5 mins break
- Each 25 mins work period is called “Pomodoro”
- After 4 pomodoro sessions, take a longer break of 15–30 mins.
This will help you to better focus on your work and would avoid burn-out too.
As you work on the task, there are regular disruptions every single day throughout the sprint. Some colleague needs your help in his task, your manager wants your expert opinion in some other matter, there is an issue in some other piece of software and DevOps needs your help for a hot fix and so on.
- Always try to help, but avoid un-necessary disruptions
- Set focused coding hours where you try to avoid interruptions
- Don’t hesitate to ask for help, if you are stuck
- If you are a team lead and can delegate, do that
3. Accountability
Accountability is all about taking ownership of your mistakes. Mistakes are an inevitable part of software development and all software developers make mistakes; minor or major.
There are two ways to handle mistakes.
- Hide your mistakes: When you hide your mistakes, it shows that you are immature, you don’t have integrity, you are not open to learning, and you will commit similar mistakes again. In such cases, because you are hiding your mistake, corrective actions can not be taken well in-time. You don’t have broader vision of the whole software working and impact of the mistake, so even the mistakes that you consider minor, end up proving costly for the organization.
- Accept you mistakes: When you accept your mistakes, it shows that you are mature, have integrity, are open to learning, and want to save your organization from costly mistakes.
So instead of hiding and running away from what happened, you should admit the responsibility. Use the opportunity to take a step back and analyze what went wrong, how it can be fixed, and most importantly how it can be prevented in future. Share the conclusion with your colleagues as a learning opportunity so that similar mistakes can be avoided.
4. Teamwork
Most of the software developers are working as part of a team. In a team, all members don’t have same personal traits. Some of them are very reasonable and easy to work with, and some are very difficult to work with. At times, you may agree with your team members on some matters, and there may be cases when you don’t agree with them. So you should have soft skills and personal traits like patience, open-mindedness, and empathy to handle such situations.
The idea of teamwork is to work well with others and find a balance in your approach.
5. Empathy
Empathy is your ability to understand feeling of your teammates. When you are empathetic, you put yourself in your teammates position and try to feel, what they are feeling.
Let’s take few examples:
- Empathy for non-IT co-workers: There are non-IT colleagues in your organization and you are talking to them about some project. Those colleagues don’t understand coding jargons. So if you will use those jargons, they will be unable to follow the whole discussion. Being empathetic, you would try not to use coding jargons and would use simple words so that they may follow the discussion and participate in that well.
- Empathy for your teammates: There are some junior developers and they need your help in code base. Being empathetic, you would try to put yourself in their position and see how you would have liked to be treated in similar situation. So you would help them by providing documentation of code base, explaining logic of the code, or any other help that you could do.
- Empathy for software users: While coding your software, you would put yourself at software users position trying to see how would ‘you’ like to use the software. Being empathetic would help you a deliver a better software that users would like as you have considered their requirements.
Soft skills are normally ignored by software developers. I hope this basic soft skills guide would help you in your career.
