Of course, hard skills are important — that's why a person gets hired in first place. Soft skills are important as well, without them they will get fired soon. Meta skills, I suppose, come with experience over time — but unfortunately not for everyone. They are usually taught by experienced engineers either in person or via educational materials, and still might not be picked up by a person.
-- Ego
+#### Ego
It's important to be humble not only for good communication and team work, but also because it helps at avoiding the expertise traps. When being an expert becomes a problem and a quick way to self-deception. That's why it's important to always be careful with personal experience — it might be irrelevant when a fresh look is required.
-- Empathy
+#### Empathy
Same thing as with Ego - being empathic is an important skill in human relationships. But also, it might be a good hard skill. I learned about it in the aforementioned Flow. It described an ability to identify with something non-working (a toaster for example) — "if I'm a toaster, where would I break" — this internalization approach might help to understand how something works and figure out the problem.
-- Zooming out
+#### Zooming out
It's valuable to be conscious enough of spending too much time on some activity. There is no point in traversing the problem in depth if it's unclear if the assumption/way is valid. Unfortunately, even experienced engineers get into this trap quite regularly.
It's valuable to be able to zoom out, reflect on the process and time-spending for overcoming the self-deception. I guess that's why [the pomodoro technique](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique) is popular. Same thing as a simple walking (also improving the mental health & thinking) and controled interruptions (uncontroled ones just break the flow state).
-- [Socratic method](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method)
+#### Socratic method
[Pair programming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_programming) is a popular and wide-known technique to work together on a problem. Not only two expertises connect but, more importantly, two different perspectives allow to exchange understandings.
The idea is to develop a mental model, develop a psychotechnology, to be able to have an internal dialogue with it. And it shouldn't be limited only to the professional domain, it's also a very powerful thing for everyday life. A good demonstration of this approach is [Internal Double Crux](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mQmx4kQQtHeBip9ZC/internal-double-crux) from therapy.
-- Relevance Realization
+#### Relevance Realization
One more extremely important skill that intersects with the others — it's an ability to know what's relevant at the moment (maybe it's more an attribute or a mental tool that's not under direct control). This helps to understand when to zoom out, to notice that something is wrong, this way or premise is incorrect and it's time to get back. This skill helps to maintain a proper discussion with coworkers, when people tend to speak about so many different things, diving into technical details that might be simply _irrelevant_ to the actual problem. It helps to write proper comments on reviews. Not to mention a hundred typos, but to pay attention at the correctness, performance, potential architecture problems. It helps to open proper PRs, without noisy refactoring, &c.
projects / xn--bdkaa.com.git / commitdiff