5 Qualities of a Successful Developer

What you need to move forward in your career. Hint: none of them are tech skills!

Everyone tends to focus on technical skills when they start wanting to get ahead in their career. And by all means, you should give it the importance they deserve, after all you ARE using the every day.

However, when it comes to moving forward and up, usually what helps you is not the same set of skills everyone else has, but rather the skills that single you out. Whatever you can do that others can’t, is usually what will highlight your profile to your manager.

When it comes to the career of a developer, the skills that will set you apart are:

1. Consistency

The most important aspect of any developer is their consistency. Mind you, this is an important trait in any profession. If you don’t show up every day, you won’t improve over time.

But if you stop showing up because you’re too discouraged to do it or because you start listening to naysayers, then you can kiss your goals goodbye.

2. An Open Mind

I hate generalizing because 99.9% of the time, you’re wrong and there is always an exception to the rule (#seeWhatIDidThere?). However, if I had to pick one common flaw in all developers, I would go with ego.

Especially at the start of our career, we think we’re better than others — be it other developers or those who work with technologies considered “easier” than ours. Or even non-devs, such as designers or QA testers. We’ve all been there.

An open mind also gives us the superpower of admitting we’re wrong at times. Not many developers can do that — especially not if you combine it with “after receiving negative feedback”. Mistakes help us grow, so embrace them and learn from them!

3. Patience

Coupled with consistency, this is one big quality of a successful developer. There is no way you can keep showing up if you don’t have enough patience to understand that whatever you’re trying to achieve will come. It’s “just” a matter of time and effort.

The lesson here is simple: Understanding comes with time and effort, which is also a way to describe patience. Time + consistency = patience.

4. Experience

Duh! Well, it has to be said, but you can’t be successful overnight — not the way I define “success” anyway.

But experience means more than just years. It also means a collection of learnings gathered throughout the years of working on multiple problems.

By pulling from that experience, you can teach others, tackle any problem you face (no matter how alien it might seem at first), and that is also how you give your managers the confidence that you can deal with any project.

5. Communication Skills

Finally, being confident, experienced, and always learning is not enough. You need to show it, prove that you can do anything, mentor others, and ensure that your leaders know what you’re doing.

Fact: You can’t do that if you don’t know how to communicate with people.

By knowing how to explain your ideas and propose solutions that others can easily understand, you’ll become a great asset to your group and your organization. Someone others can come to for advice, ask questions, and rely on to provide a solution they can understand.

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It’s all about understanding that learning takes time and that it’s perfectly fine to ask questions and not know things. And finally, make sure people know what you’re doing, what you know and what you’re learning. Publish, have meetups, give talks, chat with people, make noise. That’s the key.

Until then, have a lovely day!