As engineers, we overestimate what we can accomplish in the short term via sheer herculean effort and underestimate what we can achieve with long-term planning. At IVR Technology Group, we have a team of developers that have worked together for over a decade. Not only have we become good friends, but we know each other’s strength and weaknesses. Here are three traits to look for when hiring a software developer.
Perseverant
In today’s frantic world, we value instant gratification over delayed/deferred satisfaction. Software development is a challenging profession. There will be periods of time during one’s career where you feel overwhelmed and not in control of what is going on around you. Having the perseverance to figure something out is an essential trait of a good software development team.
Pragmatic
It is human nature to criticize and give one’s opinion without seeing the full picture. But for software developers, there’s no sidelines/armchair quarterbacking. A development team sometimes has to work off of specific challenges like tight deadlines, low budget, lack of specification, no documentation etc. As engineers, we tend to think our code is the best and have a very negative attitude towards “legacy” code. It’s easy to build an application from scratch and design something for today. It’s every developer’s dream.
Problem-Solver
As a developer, you can’t let a problem hinder the process. Instead, you enjoy solving problems. A crucial part of being a software developer is to take a problem, own it, refactor it, and find ingenious solutions to work around it. As engineers, our primary goal is to solve the problem by coming up with better solutions to an existing problem. So the sooner, we take ownership of a problem such as “legacy” code, the sooner we can get to solving it.
Building A Stronger Development Team
At IVR Technology Group, as a team, we take ownership of all “legacy” code and as such, we build a cohesive and strong team that works together. By changing our attitude from negativity and blame to taking ownership and showing respect as a team or individual, you are changing your whole mindset towards legacy code and software development in general.