The Missing Files: 3 Non-Technical Skills Your Boot Camp Didn't Cover
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It’s easy to get lost in yet another library, language, or algorithm. Keeping up with the hard skills in tech is a challenge, and often eclipses the foundational abilities that define a great engineer. These aren’t always the easiest abilities to track, but they are what set an effective teammate apart from one who merely executes tasks.
Communication: Your READMEs Should Actually Be Read
Yes, those emails, wikis, and repository READMEs do matter. They accumulate to become not just how you share information, but also how you are perceived. Having a mastery of what to share, and how to share it, will benefit you beyond your work life.
In a technical context, accuracy, detail, and conciseness are paramount. Leaving an incorrect comment can derail not just your teammates, but also your future self. Taking the time to be thoughtful and concise pays for itself in the long run. Good communication is how you refactor uncertainty into clarity.
Flexibility: The Ability to Pivot, Not Panic
It’s a given in tech: sudden requests, big or small, come in from stakeholders, causing everyone to adjust their goals to meet new demands. While this isn’t always the ideal situation, being able to roll with the punches and shifts is key to professional resilience. As lovely as it would be to have a clear, unmoving plan of tasks, projects, and objectives for the next few months, that clarity is rare.
Being flexible doesn't mean always saying yes; it means maintaining a calm, professional – and approachable – demeanor when the product roadmap suddenly changes. This is the skill that allows you to manage whiplash and keeps your team moving forward.
Mentoring: Being the Torchbearer and the Learner
It can seem like the next great teacher in tech will be, without question, an AI agent or some similar automated means. While that’s one avenue of learning, there’s no comparison to being taken under the wing of a veteran engineer. There are pitfalls to every project, every architecture, and every language. We rarely live long enough to experience them all, so we must be thankful for a friend who takes the time to point out the known dangerous paths before we barrel down them.
Conversely, if you have been on a team for a time, you may find that you are now the next to be a mentor. Even if you’re not that far into your development career, there’s still something to share with those who are coming up. We all move from "Imposter Syndrome" to "I Got This" by leaning on one another.
At UpWiSE, we have engineers at all levels of their careers sharing their insights, journey, and advice on the path they’ve taken. You are welcome to join us. We’re your biggest career cheerleader – we’ll help you push your career forward. Visit us at upwisesc.org.
