What are Soft Skills?
First, hard skills are basically skills that can be measured or quantified in some way. They are job-specific and can be learned in institutions or through apprenticeship courses.
Soft skills are less defined and more universal, as they cut across all careers that exist today.
1 - Effective and assertive communication
You must communicate clearly, which means you must always put yourself in your listener's shoes, whether they are a user, a product manager or a teammate.
Show genuine appreciation for people and their work, people can always feel it when you do. These tips lead to a better work environment where everyone feels seen, heard and valued.
2 - Self-awareness
This is a very important skill to hone. It involves understanding yourself at all times. Working as a developer, it's important in your day to day life to be very confident to express what you know, and very capable of expressing or communicating what you don't yet know.
It's a sign of strength to respond with, "I still have no idea how this works." Show honesty and willingness to learn.
3 - Time management
Time management skills are super important in every developer's life, as almost every project you'll be working on has a deadline.
One tip is to create a schedule for yourself and stick to it. Also, creating healthy breaks and having boundaries can be very helpful. You have to make time to eat, exercise, rest and work.
4 - Empathy
This simply means putting yourself in other people's shoes, this would mostly involve your daily interactions at work. Do you remember to make sure the codebase is as readable as possible for the next person accessing it?
Practice being understanding when teammates underperform, try to find out if they are dealing with anything in their personal lives
5 - Responsibility
Taking ownership of your decisions, choices and actions at every point of your journey is also another very important skill to have. Realizing that everyone makes mistakes and failure isn't necessarily a bad thing will help a lot.
Some of the mistakes you'll make as a developer can be less impactful for the company or team, while others can have a huge negative impact.
Bonus -> Open Mind
Developers, by nature, are often strongly opinionated, and this applies to everything in your everyday life. Having an open mind can be a great skill to have.
You can be very stubborn, but you are still open to new things, new ideas and a new framework to achieve your goals better and more effectively.
Top comments (1)
In over 25 years of experience, I've learned that deadlines (on projects/tasks that actually have them - which are usually the minority) effectively mean nothing. The work is done when it's done. Deadlines are usually just artificial attempts to motivate faster work - usually at the expense of quality and/or sanity.