Last Update: 28/July/2019.

The guide contains various soft skills that are usually (but not mandatory) required for various software engineering positions, and that are independent on:

• Knowledge of a particular programming language and/or software technology
• Experience working with a specific platform
• Your age or any other attribute you can think of

The the following skills will make you a better engineer/developer as well as greater person, that people want to work with (but doesn't guarantee 😄).

• An ability to formalize the exact task that you work on. An ability to answer to the following questions:

• Why am I working on at this particular task?

• Why this particular task is that important right now?

• An ability to evaluate deadlines for current and dependent tasks.
• Being able to execute tasks before the deadline that was set or promised, without reminders and awkward conversations on both sides.
• An ability to report/notify about various issues that your team needs to be aware of.
• Remember, your team counts on you. If you feel like you need some help, that's absolutely normal - simply ask.
• When someone needs help, be responsible for his/her success, help them out.

• Make your own schedule when you feel you'r most productive
• Don't delay the most challenging or annoying tasks: it's better to get "rid" of them as soon as possible:
  • Solving the most challenging tasks first, will give you a positive vibe, rather than draining your physchological energy.
• Take care of yourself:
  • If you feel healthy and happy, then you'r work will reflect that as well.
  • Sleep enough and make that consistent.
  • Eat regularly and drink a lot of water.
  • Find time to exercize. Even having 20 minutes excersizes everyday will make you more energized and healthier. Remember, you don’t need hours of excersizes to be healthy and look good. Consistency and discipline is more important here as well.
• Clean up your workspace:
  • What's the point in living in a mess? - Your workspace (both digital and physical) should be organized and minimal - don't keep outdated and unused things.
  • Our work takes most of the time. Do you want to be surrounded by a mess most of your life?
• Personal knowledge and code base should be also well organized. You should be able to find what you need with ease.
• Make frameworks and libraries for yourself:
  • By organizing programming solution as reusable packages into different categories, you will build up your own framework collection and be able to reuse it and later safe a lot of time.

• Always evolve:
• There are numerous tutorials, articles, guides, books, podcasts, open source projects and other materials that are valuable sources of knowledge.
• Remember: the lack of experince can be partially fulfilled by knowledge. The more you know, the easier for you to pick up something new and dive in.
• Make it your daily routine:
  • Have a list of learning materials that you need to learn.
  • Be disciplined and invest time and energy to educate yourself, everyday by a bit.
• Have your own projects:
  • You personal, private projects may develop slow, but one day you possible be able to monetize them, or possibly create your own company.

• Know tools that your team uses.
• Don’t be afraid to communicate with your clients, even if those are inside your company.
• Be able to effectively collaborate in your group or team as well as with other goops or teams that have or may not have direct relation to your work.
• Reflect on yourself and your work during the communication process with your teammates.
• Empathy. That what makes your a great human being and as a result professional.

• An ability to split big chunks of work:
  • A TASK should be split into subtasks such as: T, A, S and K.
  • Be able to define coupling between the subtasks and start resolving them one by one.
• An ability to find easy (relatively) solutions for complex tasks.
• Being able to understand that each task has many possible solutions.
  • Being able to find those solutions, evaluate them and select the most optimal one for your current context and environment
• An ability to make sure that a task is really solved
• An ability to explain and formalize a problem - that is a half way in resolving it.

• An ability to write understandable code that is can be easily understood.
• An ability to document your work with the standards that are canonical for you context or workplace.
• Being able to work with the code that was written by someone else.
  • An ability to perform code review, refactoring and optimization of existing code.
• Unit and, if needed, UI test your code.

• An ability to dive in into a new technology in a quick and effective manner
• Understanding of the exact scenarios of various usages of the architecture that you either use or develop
• An ability to develop, maintain and refactor architectural solutions
• An ability to search and integrate an existing solutions, rather that reinventing a bicycle (if applicable, in some cases a reinvented bicycle is perfectly fine)
• Being able to design and develop APIs, frameworks and modular systems that can be reused across different software products

• An ability to use various metrics as arguments
• Willing to teach and mentor other people
• Participation in hiring process, helping them out to adopt to a new work environment and culture
• An ability to speak the same language with either developers or business-oriented people, ask appropriate questions, structure your thought process and give appropriate and contextual feedback
• Being able to understand how business decisions affect the process of software development, prioritization or tasks and features.

Please note that this is not the ultimate guideline about soft skills. If you feel like there is something that can be added and chagned, please let me know.

Astemir Eleev

The project is available under MIT Licence