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Discussion on: What Is Your Greatest (Unique) Strength as a Developer?

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Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard • Edited

As a team lead, I started at my last job to emphatically and regularly say that I didn't have the answers, I merely had lots of practice in turning my ignorance into questions that could then be answered with Google/Wikipedia/My IDE/Whatever.

So during our Slack meetings, I started the habit to share my screen, say "I don't have the answer here but what I would do is to ask me whether xxx, so I would search for yyy in zzz (do it live). Oh here I find that xxx but I wonder if yyy so I would do zzz (do it live). Oh guys I think we have the solution now".

After a few sceances, my colleagues were like "holy shit, I'm now pretty sure I could find the answers myself by using the same method".

IMHO Socrates would have been the best developer of his time

The Socratic method is a form of cooperative argumentative dialogue between individuals, based on asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking and to draw out ideas and underlying presuppositions. It is named after the Classical Greek philosopher Socrates and is introduced by him in Plato's Theaetetus as midwifery because it is employed to bring out definitions implicit in the interlocutors' beliefs, or to help them further their understanding.