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Discussion on: Often neglected skills new devs should learn?

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Chris James

Empathy.

So many teams have suffered from people lacking empathy and it sours relationships.

Software development for anything non-trivial is a team sport and as such you need to be able to work with people effectively.

In more concrete terms: See some code you dont like? Rather than yelling loudly and complaining think about the circumstances of how that could've happened.

retrospectivewiki.org/index.php?ti...

Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.

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J Silverstein

I used to teach at a developer bootcamp and the first homework assignment I always gave the students was to watch MPJ's wonderful video Does a Developer Need to be Nice? and write a little reflection on it. It's such an important skill to have.

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Thomas H Jones II

Hell... Even absent working on a team, when you have to revisit code you wrote "a long time ago" (frankly, anything you've been wholly divorced from more than a month or two), you'll find those kinds of things in your own code. There's been more than a few times where, if I hadn't commented why I made a given choice, I'd be asking myself "dafuq were you thinking with this???"

In general, when you have a question about anyone's coding choices - even your own - ask why that choice was made. It's a lot less accusatory to ask about the decision-basis than just shred and provides opportunity for both parties to learn.