Developers are dedicated to the craft of coding, but deep technical expertise isn’t the only asset that creates a successful career trajectory.
Justin Bolles, a Senior Software Architect on Resultant’s Application Development team, believes a special mix of interests, professional expertise, and interpersonal skills make a truly dynamic developer who can thrive in a fast-paced tech environment.
1. Generalist Over Specialist
Great developers are driven by the technology, letting it specialize instead of a person specializing.
While no one person can be an expert in every coding language, successful developers are inclined to dive into multiple languages and work with the right one that fits the client need and the client project.
Developers at Resultant are often challenged to combine multiple technologies and languages into one project to develop outstanding, innovative solutions. Having flexibility is key and one of the primary building blocks of an outstanding development career.
2. Thirst for Knowledge
Being a generalist goes hand-in-hand with a deep passion for learning. Technology is constantly evolving. Techniques and best practices change. Certain languages increase in popularity. Having the drive to further your expertise on your own is important to success and becoming an even more well-rounded developer.
Looking for a team that shares and supports an enthusiasm for cross-functional training is also key to catapulting your career. Some companies, like Resultant, embrace giving employees opportunities to explore the skills that interest you and help the team in the long run.
3. Independent Problem Solving
At its core, coding is a matter of solving a series of problems until the best overall solution is achieved. When you’re working on a piece of a project within a team, it’s important to understand how it fits into the big picture and how your work contributes to the final product. Having this perspective of the end-to-end solution can shift how you problem-solve your piece of the puzzle and choose the best approach.
Bolles notes that Resultant’s development team approaches challenges in just this way, making sure everyone has a picture of the whole problem so everyone can affect the design and implementation of the solution.
4. People-Centric Design
Brilliant code doesn’t mean anything if the product is confusing for the end user to operate. As tech progresses and we live more of our lives in software, Bolles points out that software developers have a unique responsibility to make interaction with software as simple as possible. At the end of the day, it’s all about creating solutions that make clients’ lives better, easier, and more enjoyable.
It’s easy to get wrapped up in the excitement of writing efficient, cutting-edge code, but be sure you’re keeping the user in mind, building something useful over building something fast. At Resultant, we consider the mental mode of the client at hand. How are they going to use it? What’s intuitive to them? How can the software be developed in a way that fits into their existing job?
This is empathy-driven design at its best.
5. Interpersonal Communication Skills
Developers can get unjustly categorized as loners, but this isn’t true. The best developers have outstanding communication skills, actively engaging with all key parties involved with a project and bringing a healthy dose of empathy to the table. This is especially important at the beginning of the project when clients often present you with symptoms of an issue and your job becomes digging in to find the cause.
This also plays into people-centric design and making sure the software is natural for a person to use. At Resultant, we frequently use the analogy that the dog should wag the tail, not the tail wagging the dog. You don’t want to create software that wags the business; you want using the software to feel intuitive. This requires being able to communicate with the client from the get-go, asking the right questions, and digging deeper to identify the problem at hand.
6. Not Afraid of a Challenge
Some development jobs require tackling quick fixes and the status quo. The most dynamic developers, however, love a challenge.
Do you embrace brainstorming sessions, collaborating with a team, and coming up with innovative solutions?
At Resultant, our final product often makes a direct difference in organizations, whether it’s boosting productivity and performance, making a job easier and more enjoyable for employees, or aiding in solving larger societal issues like infant mortality rates or national security. These aren’t small, quick-fix problems; they’re complex, interesting work.
Are you ready to develop your career in a fast-paced environment that embraces interesting, challenging work? View all of Resultant’s open positions in Applications Development and more.
