Provoked by going down a rabbit hole on using adjacent skills to foster career growth and career serendipity, I wondered what skills/disciplines would be considered adjacent to software development.
Ask HN: What skills are adjacent to software development?
1–10 of 21 posts
Re: Ask HN: What skills are adjacent to software development?
#2Writing, speaking, community building are the obvious ones
Re: Ask HN: What skills are adjacent to software development?
#3Writing, You need the ability to clearly communicate in code and within team. This get more important as you get promoted.
Inner peace (mental strength). You need to manage stress, bad code and broken business process. In most cases coding is mentally exhausting.
Ability to listen people. This cannot be overstated, It helps to align effort and value. You want to do things with the highest value with the least effort.
Introspection. You need to investigate your experiences and decisions to learn. It is about learning from own and others mistakes.
I would argue that from some point in your career coding is easy part. Other aspect get more important.
Re: Ask HN: What skills are adjacent to software development?
#4[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What skills are adjacent to software development?
#5Writing, You need the ability to clearly communicate in code and within team. This get more important as you get promoted. Inner peace (mental strength). You need to manage stress, bad code and broken business process. In most cases coding is mentally exhausting. Ability to listen people. This cannot be overstated, It helps to align effort and value. You want to do things with the highest value with the least effort.…
People always mention writing, but in my experience that's a platitude.
Most senior devs I've been downstream from throughout my career write extremely carelessly. Their email, code comments, and docs (if they ever write them) are often borderline incoherent. It is the interns and junior devs who carefully "craft" emails and tenderly compose comments to remove any hint of ambiguity.
Once you're so senior that your company relies on you to announce new tech to a broad audience, you will almost certainly get the help of a technical writer.
Taking time to write well is a waste and an affectation, and it carries the stigma of insecurity. One should avoid it.
Re: Ask HN: What skills are adjacent to software development?
#6Experimentation.
If you are doing interesting work it is important to run good experiments. Bad or ineffective experiments can be a huge time sink.
Re: Ask HN: What skills are adjacent to software development?
#7User Experience, Design, Product Management.
The key roles and skill sets most engineers are collaborating with on a day to day basis.
Re: Ask HN: What skills are adjacent to software development?
#8Writing, You need the ability to clearly communicate in code and within team. This get more important as you get promoted. Inner peace (mental strength). You need to manage stress, bad code and broken business process. In most cases coding is mentally exhausting. Ability to listen people. This cannot be overstated, It helps to align effort and value. You want to do things with the highest value with the least effort.…
People always mention writing, but in my experience that's a platitude. Most senior devs I've been downstream from throughout my career write extremely carelessly. Their email, code comments, and docs (if they ever write them) are often borderline incoherent. It is the interns and junior devs who carefully "craft" emails and tenderly compose comments to remove any hint of ambiguity. Once you're so senior that your co…
It is about the message. My messages are full of typos and grammar errors But I would ask for right things, choose right level of technical jargon and cut through bullshit.
I think a lot of coding is about writing for the computer and your future self/team. You want to favor simple and easy to understand. For non-native speaker is not obvious when to use remove vs delete. For me writing/language skill is a problem.
Re: Ask HN: What skills are adjacent to software development?
#9Math
Re: Ask HN: What skills are adjacent to software development?
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
People always mention writing, but in my experience that's a platitude. Most senior devs I've been downstream from throughout my career write extremely carelessly. Their email, code comments, and docs (if they ever write them) are often borderline incoherent. It is the interns and junior devs who carefully "craft" emails and tenderly compose comments to remove any hint of ambiguity. Once you're so senior that your co…
It is about the message. My messages are full of typos and grammar errors But I would ask for right things, choose right level of technical jargon and cut through bullshit. I think a lot of coding is about writing for the computer and your future self/team. You want to favor simple and easy to understand. For non-native speaker is not obvious when to use remove vs delete. For me writing/language skill is a problem.
I wrote "careless" and "incoherent," not "ungrammatical" or "full of typos." I mean actual failure to communicate because of an apparent lack of interest in communicating effectively.