7 non-technical skills to be a great developer

Here are 10 nontechnical skills which are crucial to be a great developer yet are often less discussed.

1. Web searching (more popularly Googling)

This should be an easy guess for we all know it. However, some of us may not realize that it’s a skill (precisely a soft skill) in itself that we develop and improve over time. Identifying the right keywords, adding additional keywords to narrow down results, omitting irrelevant words in the search string, etc. are all part of this skill and you need to get good at it.

2. Typing

Surprisingly a lot of us ignore the importance of it or leave it to the thought that we will get better at it with time. We might get faster at it over time but we may not be doing it the right way and that would hinder the ease and speed you could achieve by learning Typing. There are so many FREE online sites where you could learn typing by practicing it. All you have to spend is half an hour or one hour per day for few weeks and trust me you are gonna kill it.

3. Staying up to date

Is that even a skill? I would say Yes. It’s not an easy task to stay up to date in the tech world with so much overwhelming information every day. There are so many options to stay up to date but choosing the right sources, tools, habits are essentially a skill. Different sources could include the following:

• Email subscriptions- A lot of websites offer free content over email
• Browser plugins like daily.dev or other content aggregator platforms
• Blogging websites like Medium, Wordpress.org, etc - Following right people or publications or blogs.
• Social media platforms like Linkedin, Reddit, etc., or Joining/following relevant people, pages, groups, etc. in Instagram, Facebook, and others.
• Video content sharing platforms like Youtube or other applications like Clubhouse.

Choosing the right combination from this humongous option set is definitely a skill.

4. Flexibility/Adaptability

The Tech world changes so fast and unless you are ready to be flexible with the stuff you work — It could be a tool or technology or a programming language or even a framework and adapt to it, You could be out of the race in no time. I have seen a lot of senior people getting skill outdated and ending up in people management roles with zero growth opportunities.

5. Problem-Solving

We code to solve problems. Every application we create is a solution to a problem or an improvement of an existing solution. So having good problem solving skills is required, goes with out saying. It is also required to handle other scenarios like debugging, optimization problems, early edge case detention, etc. For big product based MNCs, you would have to go one step extra in learning to solve DSAlgo problems to crack their interviews.

6. Time management

Time management is something that is applicable for almost everything or every aspect of life and this goes without saying for coding too. The reason I added this skill in this blog is specifically to remind me of how easily it could get messed while we working in offices with mismanaged work culture (as I would call it). Sometimes we end up working too much time at the office which over time will kill our learning curve and we would end up being underskilled. This could also have repercussions on personal life and health which I would cover as the next point. We need to manage time wisely not just to get things done on time but also to have enough time for personal improvement, learning, and more.

7. Work-life balancing

Again, is it a skill? The ability to manage a productive and relaxing work-life balance is the required skill of the era. Lack of which could lead to depressions, lack of productivity, mental health as well as physical health issues, and the list goes on. End of which would kill or at least depreciate the quality of your programming career.

Let me know in comments what are the other non-technical skills that you value the most that impacts your programming career.