I want to ask you one simple but important question.
You do not need to know the answer already.
If you are unsure, you can think, research, or even guess.
What matters is how you think, not whether you are right.
The Question
What do you think is the most underrated skill that makes a developer truly effective — and why?
It can be:
Technical (architecture, debugging, performance, etc.)
Non-technical (thinking, communication, patience, discipline)
Something you learned the hard way
Something you are still learning
There is no wrong answer.
Why I’m Asking This
I have been building quietly for some time, and I realized something:
Different developers grow fast for different reasons, not just because of languages or frameworks.
I want to understand:
How you think
What you value
What actually helped you improve
Your answer might help someone else reading this—even if it feels obvious to you.
One Request
Please don’t just write one word.
If possible, add one line explaining why you chose that skill.
That context matters more than the answer itself.
I’ll be reading every reply carefully.
Thank you for sharing your perspective.
Why this post will work (behind the scenes)
Top comments (8)
The ability to clarify and simplify things to others. Being told about a feature/application/process and then being able to demonstrate they understand it by summarising it back to the person correctly and simply.
De acordo.
Be curious.
Want to know how a thing works itself - and then how it works in its context.
The curiousity leads to other good things, like learning, reading and understanding documentations, being able to adopt ideas from other people and challenging those and - perhaps more importantly - working on your own ideas and (mis-) conceptions on several things.
…and additionally: it is a much better experience to work with people who are interested in things than others who just „do their coding at work“. How great it feels like to develop from a problem into a flow with several people solving it.
I think the most important skill for a developer is to gain, through knowledge, the confidence to say "no" and being able to justify why. It might not always be accepted (but that us on them.) You might be presented with compelling reasons to change your mind but that is an opportunity to learn.
Another skill is to step back from the problem to gain a new perspective with greater context. This might well increase the range of options or help you home in on the most appropriate solution.
Learning everything the hard way, as per my posts
My biggest lesson/mistake:
Stop learning more and more languages.
Work on your soft skills and think in terms of a product/features, not lines of code.
I expand on my answer a bit more here:
My Biggest Mistake as a New Coder (Nobody Warned Me)
Cesar Aguirre ・ Nov 17
That's what I call being a street-smart coder.
Writing & Reasoning.
Basics to Improve Your Reasoning
Athreya aka Maneshwar ・ Dec 18
Listening to your coworkers ideas, even if you have years more experience, know the language inside out, etc. everybody has a different perspective on things, and that’sa very good thing.
For example we have a team member who is not very sound in their technical skills, but very effective in standard tasks. When they have to implement something new, they often ask questions, and more often than not, these are the right questions to ask. You don’t need to be a top technical expert to spot insufficient or put e requirements. Experienced developers will often just chew through it and in the end it works somehow. But pointing such issues out to the person who made the requirements is really valuable and can lead to a much easier to maintain system. Sometimes they also just say something like "Please take a look at how I implemented this functionality. I implemented it just like the code we have, and it works, but somehow it looks too complicated". They still lack the skill to implement it differently, but they spot when there’s something not optimal.
For context: developer has a strong background in the problem domain, but was transferred from doing host based development into a Java team with just three months training without prior knowledge of the language.