Ask HN: Essential skill needed to be a programmer?

Know when to seek out assistance from others. I would much rather spend 30 minutes in cooperation with others than multiple hours by my self.

Work smart, not hard.

In addition to tolerance of frustration and tenacity (as has been mentioned several times here already), I'll go with being good at the old Sesame Street game "One of these things is not like the other, One of these things is not the same" - I feel like I'm playing that game a lot when I'm debugging.

I consider this essential: The ability to decouple the task from your ego.

Specifically:

- Never say "Got it" or "OK" when someone is explaining a problem or solution and you don't follow. It feels awkward to say "Sorry, I'm still not following. Do you mean that when..." five times in the same conversation but it is worth your time and embarrassment to come away with a correctly framed and well understood situation. Otherwise you will figure out what they meant after wasting hours/days/months solving the wrong thing.

- You'll be faced with situations where your colleagues/organization expect you to implement solutions you think are not the best. Understand that "the best way" for the team or business is not necessarily the same as "the best way" for you personally or "the best way" overall. You are likely missing some context about the choice. Be mindful of reputation risks, time costs and maintenance costs involved in changing the approach.

When you're asked to code something you don't agree with (including ethical issues) your options include: silently accept their approach, refuse to do their approach, propose an approach (with conversation or code) and gracefully accept the result, or find another job. Be aware that different organizations will react differently to those approaches. Under no circumstances should you fall into the trap of spending a week to convince the team to adopt a change that would save a week of costs.

Teamwork

First of all, a programmer turns a spec into working code. That's the easy part. Engineering is gathering requirements, designing the spec and ultimately coding it.

To be an engineer one must love to learn, learn fast and be able to learn on his own. It's not a job where you can expect to get training, it's a profession where you must be able to do some of the growing by yourself. It's a constant stream of new tech and new business domain knowledge. Here reading skills are absolutely required: a lot of questions can simply be answered by the relevant man page or by finding a reliable source for whatever knowledge is required for the task. You'll effectively have to become a domain expert several times in a career.

Systematic thinking and pattern recognition are essential skills to have. Our industry creates buzzwords every month and new fads in programming languages and frameworks but most core concepts remain unchanged since their inception.

Logic is absolutely required, and the ability to use the scientific method. This is crucial when debugging where you'll have to observe a problem, collect data on state, formulate an hypothesis on what caused the invalid state and verify your hypothesis. There's no "big picture" here, and every detail matters when doing this so in practice an engineers will often have to be able to keep the whole state of the system in his mind and step through it.

Communication skills are great to have; they effectively allow you to delegate and help colleagues onboard to whatever you are working on faster. From an outside point of view it's effectively super-powers, and if you want to play the politics game, allows you to get the best engineers to want to work with you.