I am the senior dev in our group. I think the biggest skill is being able to teach. Yes you could be teaching junior devs tech stuff, but there is also a lot of non-tech stuff that could be taught.
Ask HN: What non-technical skills make a senior dev and how to develop them?
71–80 of 136 posts
Re: Ask HN: What non-technical skills make a senior dev and how to develop them?
#72Frankly, none. Everywhere I know of the position of senior dev is defined solely by your technical expierence, and the screening in job interviews for non-technical skills are the same for junior or senior dev positions. Perhaps a better question is what non-technical skills do I need to work well in a team (as a senior or junior dev), every developer needs to know how to listen to people with different expierence an…
That's too bad. The senior devs I know are generally good with people: Making them better, working out differences, getting people on-board with solutions, helping one-on-one with things like code reviews and debugging sessions, writing design documents, finding and fixing bugs that aren't theirs. The list is endless. Oh, and they write code, too, generally lots of it.
I generally find that less experienced devs are the ones writing lots of code. Personally I think more and write less of it (and it usually works better).
Re: Ask HN: What non-technical skills make a senior dev and how to develop them?
#73Depends on what kind of dev you are talking about. In a consulting shop (enterprise or web dev or advertising)? Big company (software, hardware or where software dev is an expense)? Game company? Silicon Valley startup? Senior devs in each of these types of companies have some skills in common and some that are particular. The common ones, in my opinion: * Ability to communicate with non technical folks * Ability to…
Willingness to do grunt work is a fast track to becoming a manager who says "I haven't coded in years". No good deed goes unpunished. When you step up to be a team player and do that grunt work, you open yourself up to getting more and more of it. Next thing you know you have to stand up for yourself or become a door mat.
The trick is to not volunteer for recurring work. My stance is I will volunteer for 1 thing per week which is defined, ad-hoc, and <5 hours. The bonus to this is your far less likely to be forced into endless time sinks as you have team credibility to say no.
Re: Ask HN: What non-technical skills make a senior dev and how to develop them?
#74Whatever it takes to make money for customers. That's it. No, I'm not being snarky, so hear me out... I've met and worked with many developers over the years and lots of them have become very good with technology and user domains, but still have struggled to "crack the digital ceiling". These are brilliant people who have achieved serious things, but are still not recognized by the big decision makers as "senior", wh…
You are onto something but I think it's not directly about making money. In my view you need to be able to talk the language of executives which is quite different from how engineers communicate typically. If the CEO sees you as somebody he can talk to you have cracked the digital ceiling unless you make other mistakes.
Re: Ask HN: What non-technical skills make a senior dev and how to develop them?
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely. A good way to make this happen is to crank out piles of write-only code. You'll look more productive than your peers and you'll be the expert on a relatively large part of the system. When things inevitability go wrong, you'll also be the hero that powers through the weekend hacking a solution together. Be sure not to document or comment this code. It makes your memories critical to the operation of the b…
I wonder if I actually know you and the user mknocker. Seriously, it's scary to read this stuff for how real it is :)
Good to know I am not alone :) There are a few pinpoints also to detect if the company you are interviewing to is one of these. Usually, they are 'building' a new team for an existing product. As I grew up in my career I started to develop the reflex to ask why the previous folks left. You might not get an honest answer but at least it gives you more information either you should continue the hiring process or not.
Re: Ask HN: What non-technical skills make a senior dev and how to develop them?
#76Empathy is the key skill. Yes, it's learned. The ability to walk in somebody else's shoes for a while makes you a better developer. Why? * You acquire the habit of imagining what it's like to use the stuff you develop. * You have a feel for the daily experience of your colleagues, suppliers, executives and other stakeholders. These things give you the sort of spidey-sense that lets you function independently. They al…
Basically practice "How to Win Friends and Influence People."
Great book. Easy to read and full of examples.
Re: Ask HN: What non-technical skills make a senior dev and how to develop them?
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
People ask me that all the time and it's awkward. I very rarely do anything anyone else would consider "fun", even on weekends. Most of what I do can be classified as "work".
Being somewhat similar, I sympathize. I just tell them that I spent the time relaxing all weekend (regardless of what I actually did) and it seems to satisfy people. (In spite of the stereotype, I'm always surprised to see how few genuine "introverted coders" there actually are in the industry and how unsympathetic the rest are.)
Maybe the introverted coders are just less visible and not striking up conversations to ask what you did over the weekend?
Re: Ask HN: What non-technical skills make a senior dev and how to develop them?
#78Frankly, none. Everywhere I know of the position of senior dev is defined solely by your technical expierence, and the screening in job interviews for non-technical skills are the same for junior or senior dev positions. Perhaps a better question is what non-technical skills do I need to work well in a team (as a senior or junior dev), every developer needs to know how to listen to people with different expierence an…
That's too bad. The senior devs I know are generally good with people: Making them better, working out differences, getting people on-board with solutions, helping one-on-one with things like code reviews and debugging sessions, writing design documents, finding and fixing bugs that aren't theirs. The list is endless. Oh, and they write code, too, generally lots of it.
Actually in my expeirence senior deva are the less good with people (expierenced developers with good people skills often become twch leads.
But thats really not the point I was trying to make. The point is that no senior dev is hired for or because of those qualities (at least from what I've seen)
Re: Ask HN: What non-technical skills make a senior dev and how to develop them?
#79Empathy is the key skill. Yes, it's learned. The ability to walk in somebody else's shoes for a while makes you a better developer. Why? * You acquire the habit of imagining what it's like to use the stuff you develop. * You have a feel for the daily experience of your colleagues, suppliers, executives and other stakeholders. These things give you the sort of spidey-sense that lets you function independently. They al…
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Re: Ask HN: What non-technical skills make a senior dev and how to develop them?
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't have to talk about things that other people think are fun. The point is to bring up something that can get you excited and animated. If what you call "work" does that for you, then I'd love to hear about it.
You might like to hear about such things, but most people only want to hear about weekend activities they consider "fun" (e.g., going out drinking) or "normal" (e.g., doing stuff with the kids). If you say you spent the weekend learning something new, most people will act like you're boring and perhaps even make nasty comments like "you must be fun at parties" (like someone in this thread did).
I don't think it's an all or nothing proposition. If you don't know someone very well then it's likely they are just looking for small talk. In that case whether or not they are interested in the topic, they aren't looking for something that is going to turn into a deep conversation at that moment. There are ways to probe for this though, just give a high-level summary like "just did some work on my side project" or similar where you give them an opening to ask a question and go deeper. This gives an easy out to end a conversation gracefully; if an actual grownup gives a snarky response like "you must be fun at parties", that person has way worse social skills then they think they do, and in all likelihood has some pretty severe security issues.