More Than Coding

When your starting out in a career in software development its only right that you concentrate on developing your core engineering skills as a coder.

Your primary role is to engineer software and you need to be able to recognise good from bad and have a toolbox of skills you can draw on to build the systems required.

But as you grow into your career certain softer skills start to develop that are important for your growth as an engineer both on a personal level and within the organisation that you are a part of.

These softer skills can easily be overlooked if we assume our only role is to be a techie when actually we need to be more well rounded than that.

Know What You Don't Know

There is a phase in the development of an engineer when their skill is starting to develop that they feel they can conquer any challenge, they are an engineering super hero that will use software to combat all enemies.

Actually no engineer is an expert on everything, no-one has the answer to all questions.

Being a good engineer means having the ability to effectively and efficiently learn how to do something new. Your knowledge and experience makes you able to asses what good and bad looks like, even if you've never seen a technique or approach before you can spot well engineered thought through from the smell of something thats not right.

What is critical is to realise when your knowledge doesn't extend into the area your being asked about, to realise how your going to build that new knowledge and to realise that knowing what you don't know is a skill in itself.

Being a Pragmatist

Another aspect to our developing engineer is to accept no compromise in the application of their engineering skill.

While I would never for one second tell developers that should readily accept incurring technical debt there does also need to be a realisation that software that isn't shipped does nobody any good.

Another skill our developing engineer needs to acquire is a level of pragmatism to know when a compromise needs to be reached between engineering excellence and getting something to users.

The key second aspect to that skill of pragmatism is knowing how to structure the compromise so that it isn't a weight around everyones neck when developing the product further in the future.

Coding something badly is simply bad, knowing when to stop finessing and leaving room for future growth is being an effective engineer.

When Talking to Farmers Talk About Farms

A final awakening for our developer needs to be that they are part of something wider than just developing software.

They have a role to play that is wider than just being a techie they also need to be a communicator whose able to get non-technical people within there organisation to appreciate technical problems and have an appreciation for how the sausage is made.

There is a key difference here between understanding and appreciation, you don't need to teach everyone in the business to code, you instead need to build an appreciation for when a requirement is hard or easy and consequently why a suggestion of a different approach is being made.

You also need to build an understanding of what matters to others in your organisation, understanding there viewpoint while developing the language you need to use to explain how what your doing affects what they want. 

Your role here is to be a technology evangelist building a recognition in those around you of the engineering process whilst not losing sight of the fact that you all need to come together to produce products not just code.

First and foremost you need to become a good engineer capable of producing quality software but always have an eye on the fact that you also need to grow into a well rounded individual who understands all aspects of the business you are in.