I think I’ve said this before, but I genuinely believe that broadly speaking communication and other “soft” skills are more important than what are considered “technical” ability. And that becomes increasingly more true as people gain in seniority.
-
I think I’ve said this before, but I genuinely believe that broadly speaking communication and other “soft” skills are more important than what are considered “technical” ability. And that becomes increasingly more true as people gain in seniority.
Like, it’s absolutely not an all-or-nothing type of deal. But it’s more that if you can’t effectively work in a group setting, the importance of someone’s individual technical ability increasingly begins rounding to irrelevance.
-
I think people might disagree with this one, but hear me out: I don’t feel like people should be able to advance beyond what is now considered “senior” on technical merit alone.
Anything beyond “senior” in tech companies are broadly generally leadership positions. I don’t believe that you should need to re-spec into people management or project management to advance. But I do believe everyone above senior should be able to manage people and projects in a pinch and not do a terrible job.
-
It’s also my sincere belief that once you hit a certain baseline of technical ability, you tend to be able to swap between sub-fields with relative ease.
Build systems are like compilers, are like databases, are like operating systems. PL combines logic and HCI. Front-end programming has a lot in common with distributed systems and embedded programming. And so on.
It’s not all exactly the same. But close enough that concepts tend to translate, and you can always pick up what you don’t know.
-
@yosh another one i see: being able to switch between development and ops
at minimum this endows you with a certain amount of empathy for the other side of things - even if you're never going to do sre-ish things, you need to be able to work with them and understand their thoughts and concerns, and vice versa
what's more, as you move up you more likely than not will have to do some amount of both anyways. owning a system tends to involve both operational and development responsibilities
