Traits of the 3 Most Successful Developers I've Ever Worked With

I've worked with a lot of great developers, but 3 developers on 3 different teams really stood out to me. Here's what people admired about them.

Always remember, there are MANY ways to be successful as a developer. It's okay to be socially awkward even. I know a ton of people are worried about their personality fitting in. You just have to make up for it in other ways...

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Transcript

Don Hansen: 0:00

When I was interviewing for dev jobs a long time ago, I always wondered who were the successful developers on the teams that I was interviewing for. And so I want to share three developers at three companies I've worked at as a dev. Um, and I want to share some of their traits. They were some of the most successful people, dependable people on the teams, and they were loved on the teams and throughout the company. And so let's just start with the first one. Um, I'm not gonna give names or anything like that. I don't think it matters, but I'm thinking of a developer who kind of was just available to everyone. Like he, if people had questions, like sometimes people are just kind of afraid to bug people. And this developer was just available, he made himself available a lot of the times. And you know, you can stretch yourself too thin and sacrifice your focus, but if someone needed him, he was there. If someone needed to touch base with him, he was there. He made himself available always. And you're gonna notice, well, I noticed a lot of these traits caused some of these people to kind of hit burnout at different times, and you gotta find your balance. But you know, this developer was just always available and helped out anyone that needed help. He was just very likable in that sense, and the way that he talked to people, he talked to people in an empathetic way. He, you know, especially sometimes things can get heated and sometimes blame can be placed. And he was always a person that tried to analyze, I think he did it too often, but he analyzed what he did wrong and tried to blame himself. He was better than me for that. I still remember the day that I blamed the product manager, and it just wasn't good. I still think it was his fault, but I still like could have owned what I could have done better and started with that, and that's something that he did well. Um, not the project manager, the developer. Um, it's just something he was very liked for, and he was just approachable and he disarmed people. They didn't get aggressive with them, they didn't argue with them a lot, like they just immediately were open to what he had to say and what he had to contribute because there's just this confidence that this aura that you give off when you don't let your ego control what you say or what you do. It's just something in the background, something when you're around people like that, you want to listen to what they have to say. You respect them. Because a lot of times you're not, you know, when you're talking with someone that doesn't really try to understand what you're saying, understand where you're coming from, your guard goes up, and you don't really get very far with a with, or it takes a lot longer to get to kind of an agreed upon point or to collaborate with that person to be able to push that product out faster. A lot of blockers tend to happen when people don't take pure ownership, like a lot of just really dumb blockers, and you never experienced that with him ever. He was just a developer that was just awesome to work with all the time, and I think that's one of the most admirable traits that I've seen in people like him, and people like that just move up, right? They can work with people, they get leadership positions. Um, sometimes you get people in leadership positions that don't belong there, but this he belonged there, and he's been doing very well for himself. Um, every company he goes to, it's just he does very well for himself. I want to jump to a developer at my second company who was just so curious that he would sometimes burn himself out with how deep he would dive into coding after work. But it was always rewarding at the end, right? He'd get kind of frustrated sometimes, he'd get a little bit agitated because there was so much to do, but he was just someone that chased that challenge all the time and he dived deep. He dove really deep. And a lot of the hard problems that I faced were very easy to identify for him, even if like he didn't really understand the library just yet. He was just he cared about being a really good software engineer. Anything that he might have to encounter with his job, any hard problems that we had to face, like he just dove in and did not stop. He was relentless with becoming a good software engineer. He just liked software engineering so much, and he just liked the challenge. He really, really liked the challenges, and he was really good. He's doing very well for himself. But a lot of successful software engineers, they're just really fucking good. By the way, if you are diving deep into Node and you've already built a few things with Express, it might be time to challenge yourself with a more scalable framework, NeskJS. It's one of the most popular frameworks for Node, and I personally use it to build my projects. It's one of the reasons why I decided to build a course for it, to get people up to speed with the basics. Find that course at Scrimba.com. Oh, it's also free. If you use my link in the description to sign up for Scrimba and you decide to upgrade to the Pro Plan, which unlocks a ton of different courses, you actually get a discount. Again, I partner with them because they are actually really good at building up junior developers. Check it out. What do you have to lose? Now let's get back to the video. And if you feel like you know you got an awkward personality, one way to make up for that, if not entirely, it's to become a really good developer. Care about that skill development, care about that deep knowledge. And also, as you kind of get more comfortable in a company and you start getting a little bit more trust to take more ownership over other parts, be willing to be more of a generalist. Be willing to learn stuff and adapt and just be really fucking good at whatever you do, whatever you problem you have to tackle. Because you are a problem solver. You care about whatever problem is in front of you, you're gonna solve it. And that type of person will be good outside of coding. It doesn't matter the problem. It's just a mindset at that point. It doesn't matter the problem. They can go outside of coding and then go to finance and go into healthcare. It doesn't matter. They're gonna be really good at whatever they do. But that is a type of software engineer. Like, there are just some people that kind of just coast by you work with them, some of them, and they're doing the bare minimum possible. You know the types of software engineers, you know what the team thinks of them. Even if they don't speak it out loud, like you kind of just know you know that the really good software engineers are well respected. You respect the really good software engineers because of what it took to get there, to get that knowledge, the drive, the character they had to build. You just know what it takes to get really good at something. And then the third developer at my third company, he was just dependable. He worked way too often. But he just delivered everything. It might not have been the best code, right? I don't think he was as good of a developer as the one I was talking about, my second company. But he got it done. And he did care. He was always trying to improve. He's a bit newer than the second developer that I mentioned. Um, but he was a senior developer at my uh third dev job, and it just every deadline he hit, anytime the company depended on him or needed to depend on someone, they depended on him. He's a back-end focus, but he's good at the front end. Like I remember him doing code reviews for a lot of my front-end code. He just he knew JavaScript very well. But he's just dependable. That's it. Right? And that might sound bad to you because he had to work a lot of extra hours, but he was just that person that always got it done. Things did not get delayed, and if they did get delayed, it wasn't his fault, it was never his fault. And I think a lot of teams, CTOs, they'll help you through trying to grow and kind of like if there are blockers, they want you to teach you how to overcome those blockers on your own. And like, like, what is your thought process that we need to improve so that you are able to problem solve through this more quickly next time, right? But leaders just want developers that are going to do what they say and get shit done. And we're in a market right now where that really matters. Think about even your own coding journey. You know what you need to get done. Are you getting it done? Because the people that are also applying for the same positions, there are plenty of people that are. There are plenty of people that are spending more hours than you because they feel like they're not learning quickly. They feel like they're stupid. Good developers make up for that. Oftentimes it's just an illusion, it's just a self-confidence issue, but um, they make up for that by just putting in the fucking work. There are developers that just put in way more work than you could ever know, than you've ever challenged yourself with. And a lot of these traits, I am not saying I have most of these traits. I'm always trying to improve this stuff. I looked at all of these people, I put them on a pedestal. They were really good at what they did, and they were well respected for it. I'm not saying this trying to talk down to you. I'm saying that there are good developers that are even applying for entry-level positions that haven't had a dead position, but they're just like people that have built up the characteristics and the habits to be a really good developer before they even break in that you're competing with. I really want you to be aware that there are being a developer is multifaceted. There are different ways that you can really stand out. Sometimes it's social, sometimes it's more technical. It is a balance at the end of the day. But one thing that I can promise you from what I'm seeing with some aspiring developers, and it's still just a minority, but you're competing with them, they are putting in the work. More work, significantly more work than I'm doing for my business right now. They're really good. And they will get hired if they don't give up. So set a schedule for yourself, and if you know you need to get something done, get it done.