I followed plenty of reports from Twitter and Meta. I also read dozens of the comments to the CEOs statements. You know what? It’s terrible that the leaders of our hi-tech world can’t communicate well. Let’s not be like them and appreciate the soft skills again!
Communication is a key (also for devs)
We all know very well that working in IT is mostly about writing. But not just writing code. As well as writing line after line in your favourite editor, you also write hundreds of lines every day on Slack or another company’s tools. Don’t be fooled into thinking that only the quality of this first ‘category of lines’ matters. Communication with your team is just as important, because it determines both the quality of your feedback, and the development of your career to a senior role.
Okay, so how to communicate effectively? This is brilliantly covered by Karl Sutt, who has some advice for you on giving instant feedback, but also tips on writing pull requests, RFCs and other developer nightmares (including the essays you write in place of technical writers).
An interesting extension of this topic might be for you to look at the soft skills useful in senior roles. The Codemotion blog article is based on the insights and conclusions of Klarna’s developers, so you can be sure it’s proven knowledge. It devotes a lot of space to asynchronous communication, i.e. communication conducted sporadically on several channels. We’re talking about all those situations where you’re simultaneously writing a comment in Jira, replying to an email, and trying to focus on a call, and then waiting a shorter or longer time for a response from your recipient. The text I recommend will help you to tidy it up.
By the way, after several years of working remotely, I think we still miss solving problems over coffee a bit. Or maybe I’m the only one who feels it?
Sources:
- https://www.codemotion.com/magazine/soft-skills/its-not-just-code-here-are-some-key-skills-for-real-senior-devs/
- https://www.karlsutt.com/articles/communicating-effectively-as-a-developer/
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Web Developer essentials – growing thread!
Do you remember the post on the most interesting IT specialisations for 2023? In it, I mentioned that UX/UI will continue to hold strong and, consequently, frontend developers shouldn’t complain about a lack of work either. After all, someone has to realise the designers’ crazy visions, right?
As if on cue, we got a tip from Bentil Shadrack, who recently started a new series of posts on Web Development. I came across it on the occasion of the last update, in which Bentil suggests 5 web tools to accelerate your learning of frontend techniques (presumably they also allow you to gain a black belt and achieve frontend zen).
Among them, Exercism, where you can explore HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to your heart’s content (but also more than 50 other languages or technologies) gets particularly good reviews. You’ll ask, what’s special about this? First and foremost, the fact that the learning follows roadmaps that allow you to keep track of your progress and even map out ‘shortcuts’ to the skills that are most important to you. You can also count on the support of mentors and the community.
There is also something for snippet seekers, named Askyourcode… but that’s a topic for a whole other story.
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Another word on Meta
It’s been a few days since Mark Zuckerberg announced the big layoffs, so everyone has said everything they had to say about it. Except me. Rest assured, I won’t go into detail about cause and effect here once again – I’ll just throw in a few more clues.
First of all, I sympathise enormously with all the professionals who have worked hard to fulfil the dream of working at the Met and now have to look for a new place for themselves. I will say more. For a moment I started to feel sorry for Elon too! You have to admit that he got hit much harder than Mark for the layoffs, and yet he bears disproportionately less blame for the situation that led to the layoffs. Life and the internet are not fair.
And what led to the redundancies at Meta? Here I will share a link from my editorial colleague Arthur. This morning I received a Wired’s article from him explaining that the gigantic wave of redundancies at Meta is not “the result of a pandemic”, but “the result of years of HR policy”. It’s about specialists who worked on failed projects of Zuckerberg’s company, and after they were shut down… these people were transferred to other teams. This led to cosmic ‘overhirings’ that were not covered by the company’s current revenues. Sooner or later this had to lead to last week’s explosion.
Could it be that emotions had a higher priority there than business calculations? It is highly possible. Now we shouldn’t be surprised by the people cited on Wired who suggest replacing Mark with a “real CEO”. It seems the world has become not so kind to visionaries but probably even less for the people who work with them.
Sources:
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