The best soft skills to have as a software engineer.

Let's talk about some crucial soft skills as a developer. Many people talk about soft skills a lot and I think it's more important than tech skills. You can teach tech skills but it's difficult to teach somebody a soft skill. Soft skills are generally known as personal attributes which help individuals interact with others on the job and this is also called the combination of interpersonal, social, and communication. So we gonna talk about the five best soft skills to have as a software engineer.

1. Attitude.

Attitude is one of the important skills that an engineer can have. You should be respectful, humble, and have great common sense. It will help you avoid useless conflicts and handle human relations in smarter ways. Always be willing to listen to your seniors or your teammates. When you are working in a company and with your teammate than you spend more time with these people than you do with your family.

So when you are out there hunting for a job and you are like oh just hired me I’ll take anything, but remember you are interviewing that team as well to make sure like you are gonna be a good fit, you are going to enjoy working every day and the point is you should be a good teammate. Be fun to be around and be careful about the little things like the language that you use, the way that you treat other people, and the way that you respect other people. Just try to be a person so that everyone feels easy to talk with you and work with you. Always being a good listener I think a big component of like just having a good attitude which might be its own skill in and of itself.

2. Complex ideas (breaking them down).

This is one of the important skills that an engineer can have because we deal with complex ideas and if you are super knowledgeable but you can’t communicate that idea is almost like worthless. Sooner or later in your profession, you are going to confront an issue. It could occur all the time, or it could be uncommon, however, it's unavoidable. So how can you handle a problem that will affect both your career and the organization you work for?

Breaking down complex ideas into smaller different ideas will help us not only to finish the work faster but also you will be less inclined to procrastinate. One common way I found to do it there was through analogies.

3. Convey ideas (to-non technical people).

It's really important for software engineers to be able to talk to non-technical people because software engineer talking to software engineers like there is a lot of vocabulary that we share like jargon. There are keywords and stuff but a lot of time you have to communicate what you are building or your ideas to the product manager, designer, or other people in different roles to give them an understanding of what you are doing. So being able to explain complex subjects in easier ways is really directly paired with this and it also affects the developer's life as well and this is very like a personal situation with other people as well.

So let me take a chart for example if you wanna add a chart to your apps it could you see a basic bar chart cool or that chart could be you can scroll back ten months you can zoom in it's gonna show different things right? That chart can be really complex so that's how we break it down to non-tech people a kind of explain that spectrum of complicity and say like obviously the more complex takes more time. So being able to break that down and saying here is why I break it down so it can be able to explain like rationally and logically to make them understand it and also explain trades off. The trade-offs look like yeah we can build this feature but in order to have it up my launch day got to sacrifice this system if you want to add these features. So this is the best way to explain that to non-technical people.

4. Work Ethic (Don’t slack off).

I think this is the one that's free and what I mean by free is that anybody can do this. Being able to break down complex ideas you have to like really understand something before you can like break it down so you may not have that education but when it comes the work ethics there is no excuse, for how much you want to work and I do wanna clarify I am not talking working 13 hours days I am not talking go crazy what I mean is be productive like while you are at work. Many of you know some teammates sit on youtube all day or some couple of times and we all know if you kind of audited your day you know there is plenty of time that you are slacking off.

So I guess if you just capitalize on that and your teammate will notice that they will see how highly performant you are and I think that really resonates with them. It's really more about like making an effort it does not matter what time you are working it's really just like showing that you are really honestly trying to do a good job and bring value and that is the essential part. There are also people who are passionate about their job and enjoy working there and those people are 10 times better to work with.

5. Initiative (Show that you care).

The initiative is like taking the initiative and being proactive in doing stuff like you don’t have to be a senior engineer, you don’t have to have years of experience like anybody can take initiative. It's kind of like work ethic its free. It really the willingness to try something out and bring ideas and values to the team that they might not have before. So if you are like a junior engineer taking an initiative to learn about existing technologies, take the initiative to learn about how existing things work those are all really important things that show that you really care about working there and want to learn and be a better engineer person.

One example you know if you are a senior developer you might have the power to just build something and that could be your initiative or if you are more junior and you just can’t build something all willy-nilly in the project you know you can show initiative by saying hey I have been researching this technology may help and may be good for the project and say would you mind if I create my own branch and start implementing this and experimenting with it. 99% of the time that senior engineer is gonna be like oh hell yeah go for it that's awesome. They are gonna be so appreciative in that you are showing initiative it shows you care and they gonna love you for that.

As a software engineer especially as you progress in your career it's gonna become more apparent that no one is telling you what to do. So you have to figure out what you want to do what you can do and take initiative to do and that I think is just gonna have lots of benefits for you and the team.