Top 5 Non Coding Related Skills Every Software Developer Needs #Humor
In software development there are lots of coding skills a developer may need such as object oriented programming, knowing data structures and algorithms, and how to select the best IDE. And sure, those may help you get a job and be able to do stuff in your job but if you really want to blow away your competition you need to know more (and yes everyone around you in your job is competition, even the people in your building that don’t even work in the same company as you). Everyday you should be consuming all of your time with figuring out how to get one step ahead of them. Actual raw coding ability can only get you so far, 2.6 hours to be exact, before you will likely need to show how well you excel in one of the skills from below. Pull out your notebook and pen and be sure to take notes because these are what will get you to the top of the ladder that you are yearning to climb!
This should go without saying but this entire article is meant comically as software development satire! Please don’t take this as serious advice, that is what articles like this one linked are for.
Copy Pasta
In today’s world of Software Development pretty much all the code you ever need to write has already been written for you. You simple need to track down where that is, whether it’s from your own code examples, your team’s code base, or on stack overflow; just find it and then highlight the entire code including copywrites and non open source licenses, hit Ctrl+C and place it all directly into your code file with Crtl+V! Magic! It’s unlikely the original authors will know you did it anyways and isn’t that what the interwebs is for, sharing of knowledge?
The faster you can do this the more style points you can get as well. Practice holding down the control key the entire day as you type to save you precious milliseconds while copy and pasting. You will thank me for it when your entire team is blown away by how many lines of code you can “write” per day. Also might as well just buy a third monitor specifically for stack overflow. When you’re not copying code you can leave it open to reddit or YouTube and your boss will never know the difference.
Google Foo
In coding most of your job will be typing things you think work because you saw them in other parts of the code base and then seeing error after error during not only build time, but also run time, and likely deploy time. Even at 3am when it should be sleep time but don’t blame anyone else, you picked this career.
Simply take that error, use your copy pasta skills from above, and paste that sucker directly into Google without changing anything, even your customer IDs and user passwords because it’s likely Google doesn’t save that search history anyways. The more specific details you put into your search the more likely you are to find exactly what your problem is because it’s not what you know these days but how well you can look for what you don’t know and remember it just long enough to fix your problem. After using your newly acquired Google coding knowledge feel free to promptly forget what you just learned. You won’t need it again until two years later when you need to fix that code and can’t remember what the hell you were trying to do or if you were even the person that wrote this god awful code in the first place.
Also make sure you leave your default search bar set to search on Google. This will make things really fast when you are searching for the names of internal company projects, secret technology, and trade secrets and you think you are searching on your companies internal Wikis. Instead you will be redirected to Google where they may actually give you answers for what you were just looking for because it is crazy scary how much Google actually knows. Again, don’t be concerned because I’d be really surprised if Google saves peoples search history anyways, do you know how much space that would cost?
Making Coffee
Did you just get to the office and you already feel slightly tired that you are there. Heaven forbid as a software development we conquer our own stress management skills but lets drown those morning blues in a fresh cup of coffee after having one when we woke up and another in our drive to work. Generally the more caffeinated your blood throughout the day the better your output as your brain waves will vibrate at a higher frequency level equal to that of a Columbian Coffee farmer who I imagine harvests thousands of pounds of coffee everyday just to enable the software developer industry.
As you can see you will be drinking a lot of coffee to keep up the frantic pace of all the code you will need to copy pasta. And if you’re working in most average software shops across the nation your office just has a standard coffee pot somewhere and one of these days some scuba Steve will take the last cup without making a new pot for you when you need it right before that important 10 o’clock meeting and it’s 9:58. Now you have to wait 4 minutes for the coffee to brew and make you late for the meeting. Then when you get in you see your arch nemesis is already in there sipping a giant mug of coffee with a snicker on his face.
Talking like you own the meeting room
Before entering any meeting you should rehearse the below key phrases:
“Lets take this offline” — Basically are showing that you have no interest in being in this meeting longer than you need to be while also taking lead of the conversation.
“That sounds great, we should set a date for a date”. Use this when you don’t know how long something will take to get done or if it will even get done in the first place but want to give the impression you will think about it being done.
“This is a chicken and an egg problem”. Use this when a problem sounds complicated and you’re not sure where to start.
“This is a perfect opportunity to hit the ball out of the park”. Use this phrase when you want to influence a co-worker to do a project for you while making it appear glorifying.
“But does it scale”. This phrase will always make you sound forward thinking even if you think you’ll likely go try to get a better offer next year after you master all of these skills and become a total software developer bad ass.
Fake It Until You Make It
After spending anytime in software development you will realize it is actually a very tough career. Coding is hard and abstract, meetings require actual brain power to present your thoughts, and all the coffee in the world can barely keep you awake once 5 o’clock comes around. Then when coming into a new work place you’re at even more of a disadvantage. Your teammates actually know the code base, the goals of the team, and what is on their back log and here you have to come in and make meaningful contributions to prove your worth.
Although the tips above will help you keep the ball rolling with your code commits and your meeting dominance you still need to use great poise to make sure you always sound like you know what the hell you are talking about. Here you can use your Google Foo skills to search for popular tech buzz words to name drop things such as Message Queues, Dashboards, Metrics, and NoSql Database whenever you are talking about creating new software. Then after getting teammates to agree with using new emerging technologies you can go and actually learn the tech stack you just suggested in the evening in the 30 minutes you have between going to the gym and the nightclub. Maybe you can read how to tutorials on your cell phone while taking Ubers as well. Eventually after doing this enough you will have a strong enough grasp of the new technologies just in time for them to replaced by something better, faster, stronger, and harder to learn.
Take aways
- Copy Pasta code or entire documents to increase your individual velocity
- Google Foo to learn what you don’t know just long enough to fix stuff
- Make Coffee and drink it like your life depends on it because now that you are in tech, it does
- Own the meeting room with awesome phrases like “Let’s take this offline”
- Fake It Until You Make It because the skills you gained from the 150 leet codes you studied the week before your interview will eventually wear off
- Lastly, have a sense of humor and don’t take things too seriously! Don’t let your job define you but at the same time still enjoy what you do and remember all the reasons you got into it in the first place. In software very frequently you get opportunities to impact peoples lives by simplifying things they do and providing ways for people to destress after long days through software you work on. Use the impact you directly have to motivate you to be the best developer you can be!
Thanks for reading and hope this brought some software oriented humor to your day!
Let me know in the comments if you find these kind of programming humor and software development satire articles entertaining and I’ll be sure to write more.
Originally published at http://beapython.dev on October 20, 2020.