Developing Relationships

When you hold a senior technical position within an organisation, whilst no skill set should trump your technical knowledge of your chosen discipline, it becomes increasingly important that your able to manage relationships with those around you.

The approach to this will vary based on the people in question, whether technical or non-technical or based on the direction of seniority.

Dealing with these issues may not be why you entered your chosen profession, but if you end up in a position where you work in complete isolation it suggests that your work has no consequences and this is also not a desirable situation to be in,

As with many skills these communication skills will be earned by trial and error with bumps along the way but mastery is none the less important.

Taking People With You

There are many aspects of software engineering that align themselves more to art than science, it is also possible for a question to have multiple correct answers.

All of this means when you engage with others in your technical community people may not see things your way immediately.

If the first presentation of your argument doesn't persuade your peers its important to take a step back. Views can often become entrenched if arguments are presented more forcibly. 

Instead it can often be more beneficial to allow others to pursue alternative solutions. This will either lead to your view point being proven correct or a genuinely better idea being demonstrated. The more often this plays out the more likely people will be persuaded to your way of thinking and understand your rationale.

There can be a difficult balancing act in this situation, on occasion when arguments relate to critical issues such as security it may be necessary to be firmer but it should always be preferred to take people with you rather than force them to agree with you.        

Not Everyone Cares About The Tech

You will often be required to engage in technical conversations with non-technical colleagues. Whilst in these situations it should be a goal to educate your colleagues in technical matters, it has to be acknowledged that this has limitations.

Issues around technical debt and architecture will always be problematic for people without a technical outlook, this means no matter how much they may want to, an understanding of the technical merit of addressing these issues may always be slightly out of reach.

Instead an alternative strategy is to focus on the consequences and make the impact of these issues more tangible.

This maybe errors reported by users, performance impacts limiting sales or completed user journeys or an increase in the cost of development of new features.

If you can't make people appreciate an issue on its technical merits present the impacts in terms of things that your colleagues will appreciate. This equates to not trying to make people understand a solution make them appreciate that there is a business related problem that needs solving.

Constantly Pragmatic

If I had to sing the virtues of any non-technical skill that a technical role should require it would be pragmatism.

If you work in a sufficiently large organisation you will interact with many different people across many different subjects. If you resolve to win every argument or discussion this presents your progress in delivering the things you really care about will be severely curtailed.

Identify the discussions that are core to what you are trying to achieve and as a consequence those that are less important and where you can bend a little.

These two lists are likely to vary over time, some discussions will need immediate resolution and some may represent more long time thinking where you have more time to persuade people of the merits of your approach.

You may find that issues that are lower down the priority order for you are higher for others and being prepared to bend with others views may be reciprocated when attention turns to something you feel is key.

This may not always be easy but learn to understand problems that do have multiple workable solutions even if your preference would have been to go in another direction and save you energy and credit for the situations where you feel only one solution is the right solution.

As you interact with others as part of your role it isn't enough to only have technical skills, you also have to have an understanding of human nature and how others will interact with you and with your wider team.

This will be frustrating and possibly time consuming but is an unavoidable consequence of people being people. Remember that others maybe thinking along very similar lines when it comes to their interactions with you, recognise your own biases and tendencies to be illogical.

On nearly every occasion everybody involved in a discussion will be aiming for the same outcome only the means to achieve it is a cause of disagreement, understand that this is often a journey and help people to arrive at the same destination as you even they take a different route.