Discipline. It powerfully affects code and documentation quality, time management, operations, and interpersonal relations, just to name a few.
Ask HN: Essential skill needed to be a programmer?
31–40 of 193 posts
Re: Ask HN: Essential skill needed to be a programmer?
#32Proper literary training. With it comes memorization skills, structuring of ideas, comprehension of abstraction, naming and defining skills.
Re: Ask HN: Essential skill needed to be a programmer?
#33The ability to focus for extended period of time is important and well known.
I think that good programmers also have a better than average short-term working memory space, so they can keep relatively complex structures in their head.
Re: Ask HN: Essential skill needed to be a programmer?
#34I would say curiosity..
Yep me too. Not only a genuine curiosity. But also a desire to quench the desire by learning.
Re: Ask HN: Essential skill needed to be a programmer?
#35programming is most like looking at a lego set and being able to figure out the instruction working backward.
problem decomposition is maybe not the central skill, but the one that helped me most so far.
Re: Ask HN: Essential skill needed to be a programmer?
#36Willingness and ability to learn and to never stop learning.
Re: Ask HN: Essential skill needed to be a programmer?
#37- Understanding cache hierarchies
- Selecting good names
- And thinking straight forward, being able to count from zero to one and two and so on.
And no, it is not just a joke, but my actual opinion, that understanding the underlying machinery, communicating well, and being to able to think on your own through complicated matters are the most valuable skills in programming.
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Re: Ask HN: Essential skill needed to be a programmer?
#38By essential, it is what most engineering disciplines have in common:
Good logical reasoning, and spatial thinking/skills, ability to build up complex systems from smaller ones, and ability to understand/debug how complex systems work, and no 'magical thinking', but ability to analyze things logically.
I am seeing here a bunch of answers that mention 'communication', 'write docs', etc... etc but those are essential skills for any employee in a large company, no matter what the discipline is.
They are not core engineering skills per se (though they are necessary to perform in a large company). If you can't code, or don't understand concepts your communication skills will not help you that much. Maybe become a PM, or some kind of manager, but not an engineer.
P.s I know communication is not core, as i have worked with many 'brilliant' engineers that they had poor communication skills due to be foreigners, or just personality quirks. While that will hamper their ability to get promoted to managers, or architects, they all were respected and did well as engineers.
Re: Ask HN: Essential skill needed to be a programmer?
#39- Communication skills Being able to clearly explain why your solution will solve a given problem better than the alternative and listen to your colleagues when their suggestion is better than yours, will save you an incredible amount of frustration. It is in my opinion the most important skill I have learned - Asking why when debugging Finding the code that's causing a bug is only the first step. The next is prevent…
I don't know the sense of OP, but there's a difference between 'programming' and 'software development'--the latter is done in a team. Often the terms are used interchangeably but the skills to make one a good solo software writer only overlap with developing in a group.
I agree with the difference between programming and software development, though I'm not entirely sure on why you're pointing this difference out. Do you think my answer is not answering the OP's question? :)
Re: Ask HN: Essential skill needed to be a programmer?
#40old, but ever-green:
Although high general intelligence is common among hackers, it is not the sine qua non one might expect. Another trait is probably even more important: the ability to mentally absorb, retain, and reference large amounts of ‘meaningless’ detail, trusting to later experience to give it context and meaning. A person of merely average analytical intelligence who has this trait can become an effective hacker, but a creative genius who lacks it will swiftly find himself outdistanced by people who routinely upload the contents of thick reference manuals into their brains.