When students begin their career journey in the tech field, a major chunk of them is entirely focused on the tech part of it. Rather, IT leaders and experts believe that every programmer, either a newbie or a professional, must possess some basic non-tech skills as well. This indirectly helps in the boosting of their technical skill-set as well.
Most of them are really helpful for careers outside of programming too. But in this post, I’ll focus on why they’re useful for programmers specifically.
Problem Solving
The urge to solve something has always been the primary goal of programming. Therefore, before even choosing an appropriate tech-stack to work upon, one must know the problem at hand.
The ability to break a problem into smaller ones and then solve all of those smaller problems takes a lot of practice. Getting good at problem-solving can help you become a much stronger programmer. Try platforms like Leetcode or Hackarrank to improve yourself.
A large part of a software developer’s job is to also consider different solutions, and choose the one that is best. This is Optimization.
Collaborating
There’s a pretty high chance, that we will all work in teams as a programmer. Collaboration transcends the bounds of the IT industry and covers others as well. Thus team-work is a skill that never fails to serve, both personally, as well as professionally.
There are numerous things, that contribute to good collaboration. The first is knowing that one person cannot do everything, or at least do everything efficiently. Different people have different skills, point of view, and life experiences. That makes individuals more powerful in combination than in isolation.
Communication Skills
Good communication is crucial, whether you’re a co-worker, a client, or a manager. One must be very vivid in their communication. The more effortless and natural it is, the better is the work-flow of that organization or team.
If things are not going well, make sure to say so. But be gentle about it rather than being rude and abrupt. The team that communicates well always prevails in whatever they do.
Patience
The first thing that one needs to have patience with when programming is oneself. It is no mystery that the roadmap to becoming professional and eloquent in programming is full of obstacles. Programming is hard and sometimes you will have bugs. While some take mere minutes to solve, others might turn out to become an absolute annoyance.
But one must remember, if it’s always easy, then you aren’t challenging yourself. You aren’t growing as a programmer. We must have the persistence to keep working through a problem and not give up when it gets hard.
This must be followed with our peers as well. Be patient with other people. Things can take a while to learn and people are not perfect.
Creativity
My favorite thing about being a programmer is that I get to use my creative energy to build things that other people can then benefit from. Creativity is important for coming up with new features, interfaces, and applications.
If one lacks a creative mind, innovation cannot be born out of his work. Without creativity in any field of work, the individual will soon lose the will to pursue it further. This specifically applies to programming, as, it can become straight, boring, and repetitive in such a case.
Conclusion
The skills mentioned above help loads with writing code and being a good co-worker as well. They are so much more important than knowing a specific language, library, or framework and they go far even outside of tech. These skills will go a long way to influence your technical skills.
