Mohamed Osman has worked as a software engineer in the telecom, defense, and financial services industries for over 25 years. He has seen plenty of examples of software engineers who fail to succeed in their careers. Some are reluctant to take critical advice, and others simply fail to keep pace with emerging technologies. Then, there are those few who are not sincere about their work.
These are those who entered the field of software development for attractive salaries or with visions of creating exciting apps that are often more like gamification apps rather than business software. Mohamed believes that instead of focusing on what deficiencies are limiting your career as a software developer, focus on your strong assets - those soft and hard skills that make for a great software developer.
5 Skills a great software developer should nurture
Consider both the
soft skills and the hard skills it takes to be a software developer. Soft
skills are those innate, personal qualities that every person in every job,
must have to succeed. These include the ability to communicate well,
collaborate with others, take criticism, and the ability to adapt to changing
business situations. Teamwork, time management, and decision-making are all
soft skills that employers want from their employees.
Hard skills comprise
your education and experience that you have gained in your chosen field. For a
software developer, you will gain hard skills through the completion of your
chosen IT degree, through the certifications you acquire, and through the years
of on-the-job work you have accumulated. Software developers, they will
typically enter post-secondary school with a host of hard programming skills
that were taught in high school or self-taught, such as game coding.
Examples of the
various technical or hard skills that may be acquired by a software developer
include cloud computing, full-stack development, and even problem-solving and
critical thinking as it applies to coding. But, Mohamed Osman knows that all these hard and soft skills can be typical of even an
average software developer. So here is a list of exceptional skills to nurture
if you want to excel as a software engineer.
Collaboration and Teamwork
Those entering the
field of software development envision sitting with their thoughts and computer
while coding new apps that can help businesses and consumers operate more
efficiently and more effectively. Mohamed Osman believes that being fully ready
to work as a team is the best advice he can give to those entering the field of
software engineering and development.
Most companies will
even forego a genius programmer in lieu of a good programmer with excellent
collaboration skills. Why? Because teamwork is what makes projects succeed, and
collaboration is what's good for the company (even if it may limit the
individual's ability to stand out).
Time Management
Often, software
developers are juggling many projects at once. For this reason, Mohamed says that organization and time management
skills are critical. Time management means knowing how to plan and divide your
time between different tasks. He suggests following the 4 D's of time
management - the Do's, the Delays, the Delegate, and the Drop. Making critical
decisions on how to best spend your time will mean the difference between
success and failure as a software developer.
Focus on the Big Picture
Software developers
must have a keen attention to detail, while at the same time, having the ability
to stay focused on the big picture. He explains that big-picture thinking is
the same as strategic thinking. It takes many actionable tasks to get from
point A to point B when developing software. But if the developer doesn't stay
focused on the end user's needs or the corporation's vision, then it is easier
to go down a rabbit hole of menial tasks without accomplishing very much in a
short period of time.
Software
developers must learn to align their daily tasks with business strategies. This
includes meeting program deadlines, and deployment milestones, and having the right
information ready for team meetings and stakeholder reviews.
Intuition and Creativity
Consider software
development as both an art and a science. The best software developers have a
feeling or intuition for what is the best path to take on a new project. Much
of this skill set comes from experience, but a lot of it has to do with
creativity and being able to think outside the box. He believes that creativity allows a software
developer to also have different perspectives during the development process.
Imagine a painter with one hundred colors available on their palette can have
the intuition to select the perfect combination that inspires a masterpiece.
The combination of
intuition and creativity is derived from meaningful experiences in developing
software, along with the ability to think outside the box.
Technical Experience
While technical
experience is a necessary and critical skill for becoming a great software
developer, He has seen many IT professionals with a mishmash collection of
certifications, continuing education, and hard experience that are unrelated to
each other. This type of watering down of your IT software developing skills is
not good. Choose the main area of IT specialization and go for the credentials
that meet that specialization as much as possible.
If you're a backend
or server-side software developer, then focus on .NET, Ruby, Java, and C++
certifications. At the same time, a software developer wanting to specialize in
cloud solutions should get as much training and experience in using AWS,
Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, or other system architectures. Being a
jack-of-all-trades is rarely a sign of a great software developer.
Mohamed
Osman often sees software
developers who believe their experience in writing code is the only ticket to
success. But, corporations are looking for IT experts who can work as a team,
can imagine and implement new ways to bring software products into existence, and can get the job done while staying aligned with the corporation's
larger vision.
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