4 ms·
My very anecdotal experience: After teaching/mentoring quite a few SWEs from varying skill levels, the two traits that I find are the most important and at the
by hobofan 7y ago
My very anecdotal experience: After teaching/mentoring quite a few SWEs from varying skill levels, the two traits that I find are the most important and at the same time rare are:
- Attention to detail
- High frustration barrier
Over the course of a career those become less and less important as one learns to use the appropriate tools (e.g. linters) and processes, but you still need them to get to that point. Especially for beginners, those two in practice most often break the "everyone can learn to program" trope, that I'd like to be true.
- cestith 7y agoIndeed, I think it's two different frustration barriers. There's a high barrier to being frustrated enough to stop working on a difficult problem to improve a situation. There's a fairly low barrier to being frustrated enough with an existing solution to want to make that improvement.
- hobofan 7y agoI agree that that's also a very nice trait for a SWE to have, but I actually had the far more boring attention to detail in mind: Spotting syntactic errors in code and similar things like misspelling of variables, etc.. Hunting those down in the beginning also goes hand in hand with a high frustration barrier.
- magicalhippo 7y ago> everyone can learn to program Indeed. Everyone can learn to write code. Not everyone can learn to program. http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/SD_PPIG_2009.pdf http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/SD_PPIG_2009...