Soft skills for developers, how important is it? | By Ahmed Belaid

Being excellent at writing code was never enough, and will never be.

Gone are the days when the only important skill for developers is their development competences and technical ones, it can be easy for you to focus on the screen writing your code, and get caught up the task you are doing or the problem you are solving.

However it pays to remember that development in general is a team-work, you will interact with peers, you are part of the team, you will probably interact with a larger group, it can be any one of your colleagues (designers, QA engineers, project managers, executives…).

Therefore, it is critical that developers work well with others and this is where soft skills come in.

In fact, Soft skills are a mix of communication, Empathy, Patience open-mindedness and adaptability that enable us to work well with other people.

Moreover, Those skills are vital to the whole team functioning well together, and the project performing optimally.

General Advices :

• Try to understand the other’s opinion and how their social norms can differ from yours, it will improve your relationships with them.
• Stop dismissing other people’s point of view before finishing to hear their full argument.
• Being empathatic makes you a better human being but especially a better colleague.
• Try to be more open to criticism and change, and understand when you’re irrationally getting defensive for your opinions.

As you can see, they are all connected. You need to be humble enough to develop your confidence, soft skills for a developer are the game changers and developing your soft skills as a developer will make you future-proof; suck that, robots!