Essential skills to become a software engineer
Most of the people say that coding is the heart of software development and programming but apart from coding there are number of soft skills a programmer or software engineer should posses. So lets look at them here. Iam not including coding as a skill as it goes without saying and these are about my suggestions and opinions but upto my best I have included all the skills that are required, you may have some other skills to be important, if you find it so please comment it below. 1) Communication: What ever job we do, communication plays a vital role and its no exception to programming as it deserves to be the first place. If you are a extreme programmer programming for 8 to 9 hours continuously without communication then you can't share with people of what you are doing. So communication is a vital skill which should be developed by a software engineer. 2) Listening: You should be a good listener too. Because now-a-days people tend to become easily distracted by many things a simple message in whatsapp may be a good classical example and may become tired if they attend an 1 hour long meeting. So improve this skill of listening as many things will be learnt by listening to other experts and seniors. 3) Patience: If you have scaffolded out any projects from a frame work or command line tool, you know what I say about. Some times building the app and deploying it may takes days where people feel really uncomfortable and hesitated and believe that they are wasting their time. Actually speaking they lack the skill of patience. Of course some things take its own time. So we should wait patiently for it to happen. Hence patience is yet another important skill to develop. 4) Consistency and focus: A programmer may feel really overwhelmed for the first time he/she develops anything and that effort goes on as time passes by. He may have developed the feeling of doing the same repeated steps and code again and again. So we should not behave in a such a manner. Instead try to do the same thing in somewhat different and optimized manner and to give consistent results. 5) Problem solving: This should goes by without saying, but I have included it here again because it is much more important then raw coding, because coding in a particular programming language can be easily learnt but this skill comes from our Intellectual skills of doing and solving things. This can be improved by solving problems in well known patforms like hacker-rank and hacker-earth. 6) Passion: Of course, many people don't like to code. If you really feel interested and have good passion for coding, then coding is not going to be a problem. Not only in coding and programming, whatever job and work you do, just have interest and passion in doing those, so that you automatically put your best in it. 7) Habit of learning new things: There goes a common saying. Any thing popular in markets today becomes outdated in the next 5 years and this time span is much more shorter when it comes to software. So you should constantly be learning throughtout your life and you should have a good passion for learning new thoughts and technologies as they arise to make use of them. 8) Productive You should not really wasting time when it comes to software development because a person may write some 10 lines of code and settle this is more than enough for today. Developing a software and debugging and testing it has lot more to go. And googling the errors and trying to fix it may be yet another skill. We may be trying new code and may fail most of the times, this is not like wasting time. The point Iam coming to say is we should not be merely wasting time. 9) Good team member: No single person or individual can develop a well defined and a functional software in a short time. Mostly they would be carried out in teams. So being a good team member is also a skill to be developed. You should go along with your team ideas and people and correct them if you really feel that they are going wrong. Most of the software developments follow agile principles which believes that team work is better than individual work
So these are some essential skills to become a good and proficient software engineer. You may need not want to posses all the skills it may be ok if you have six or seven skills but try to develop the others as time goes on. Hope you find this post useful and informative.
