A detailed presentation of most usefull soft skills for softwate developers. Why we need them? How they are helping us not only get the interview, but land the job.

1. SOFT SKILLS FOR DEVELOPERS
We build.

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Most useful soft skills for software developers
Gloria Stoilova

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MEANING - SOFT SKILLS.

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MEANING - SOFT SKILLS
Soft skills are personal attributes that enhance
an individual's interactions, job performance
and career prospects.
Sometimes, it is also known as
People Skills or Interpersonal
Skills. Today soft skills are more
essential than the technical
abilities of a person

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MEANING – HARD SKILLS
Hard Skills are about a person's skill set and
ability to perform a certain type of task or
activity.
the ability to think
creatively, analyze
and understand
complicated and
abstract ideas.

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HARD skills and SOFT skills – Side by Side
Hard Skills
 Tangible
 Can be defined
 Can be measured
 Relate to an occupation
or job
 May be technical
 Learn in school or from
books
 Get the interview

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Soft Skills vs. Hard Skills – which is more important?
This depends highly on the career you choose.
Careers can be put into three kinds of categories:
1) Careers that need hard skills and little soft skills:
example: Physicists – look at …
2) Careers that need both hard and soft skills – many
careers are in this category, for example: Accountants,
Lawyers.
3) Careers that need mostly soft skills and little hard
skills, for example: sales.

8. WHY SOFT SKILLS?
We build.

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WHY SOFT SKILLS?
Technical and job-related skills are a must, but they are not
sufficient when it comes to progressing up the ladder.

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SO WHY DO IT PROFESSIONALS need SOFT SKILLS?
1) Soft Skills help you grow in career.
2) It helps develop good communication
and leadership qualities in you.
3) It helps get recognition.
4) It increases ability to perform the job.
5) Soft Skills improve our work efficiency
and performance.
6) Soft skills help contribute strongly to
the organization’s vision and strategy.
Merits of Soft Skills

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EXPANDED LIST OF SOFT SKILLS
 Communication
 Leadership
 Strategic thinking
 Delegation and motivation
 Conflict resolution and negotiation
 Influencing
 Creative problem solving
 Coaching and mentoring
 Team building
 Personal effectiveness

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MAJOR SOFT SKILLS
* Communication Skills :
* Leadership & presentation Skills:
* Decision Making and
Problem Solving :
* Teamwork and Self
Confidence;
* Ethics, Morals and
Professionalism.

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COMUNICATION SKILLS as SOFT SKILLS.
The communicative skills involve
effective communication in both
the national language and English
language in different contexts and
with different people.
The communication skill is
an important component
that lacks in the present
human capital.

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When you think of communication skills, you probably think of speaking.

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ORAL (VERBAL) COMMUNICATION as SOFT SKILLS
Odds are, you have heard a great deal
about communication skills.
In fact, “great communication skills” is
one of the most often cited requirements
for jobs across industries.
But what exactly are great communication skills?
How are they used in everyday life?
And how can you improve this set of interpersonal skills?

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WRITTEN COMMUNICATION as SOFT SKILLS
• Written communication serves as
an evidence of the events or the
actions that have been taken. Also,
there are situations that call for the
letters or memos on whose basis
certain actions are to be taken.

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PROS and almost NO CONS about WRITTEN COMMUNICATION
These steps will save you massive time
up front and distinguish you from
others who will not go the extra mile.
Written communication is the most
underrated skill in a typical developers
arsenal.
To express your ideas takes many years
of practice but the results are
intangible.

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BASIC RULES of WRITTEN COMMUNICATION

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BASIC RULES of WRITTEN COMMUNICATION
1 - Always THANK the person for emailing you. This applies to every email.
Examples: Thanks for contacting me.
Thank you for your prompt reply.
Thank you for your detailed email.
2 - EMPHASIZE the point they made and show that you understand them.
Examples: “If I am reading you correctly, you wish to . . .”;
The thing you are telling me is…;
As I see it from your mail, we need to…

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BASIC RULES of WRITTEN COMMUNICATION
3 - ASK QUESTIONS to make sure you understand what they want.
Examples: Do you really mean that….?;
Is this the way you would like to have
it implemented/done… ?
4 - AFTER they answer your questions,
reply back the same way you did
in step 2 just to CONFIRM that you
have an UNDERSTANDING.

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SOCIAL SKILLS as SOFT SKILLS
Master the art of talking to anyone.

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SOCIAL SKILLS as SOFT SKILLS
When you first meet someone, what do they notice about you?
Beyond how you look.

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WHY SOCIAL SKILLS are MORE IMPORTANT THAN PEOPLE THINK?
• Many of us don not realize the cost of having poor social skills or
the power we would gain if we improved them.
• The true cost of not having this skill goes much deeper than just
feeling uncomfortable or embarrassed from time to time.
• You might think social skills only matter for dating and parties, but
they’re absolutely crucial in business (work), too.

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REASON #1 - POOR SOCIAL SKILLS have HIDDEN COSTS
You might think social
skills only matter for
dating and parties, but
they’re absolutely crucial
in business, too.
They can be the difference
between getting a massive
payday or nothing at all.

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REASON #2 – EVEN THE “NATURALS” WORK HARD TO BE LIKED
Take a second to imagine your
favorite celebrity being interviewed
on a talk show on TV…..

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REASON #2 – EVEN THE “NATURALS” WORK HARD TO BE LIKED

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REASON #3 – IF YOUR SOCIAL SKILLS are MISSING THE MARK NOBODY WILL TELL YOU.

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REASON #3 – IF YOUR SOCIAL SKILLS ARE MISSING THE MARK - NO BODY WILL TELL YOU

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TIPS and TRICKS of developing IMPORTANT SOCIAL SKILLS
Want to meet new people and be able to
start interesting conversations?
There are some quite few common
mistakes most people make and there are
some very simple ways to learn how to
make small talk with anyone.
1. Learn to make small talks.
Learn How to skillfully exit a boring conversation

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2. Overcome shyness and build confidence.
• You have to learn to be more
confident?
Most people would assume that
this is impossible. But confidence
is a skill, and like any other skill,
you can master it over time.

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3. Stand out of a crowd.
• I know first hand that being that
awkward guy (or girl) in social and
professional situations is the worst.
It’s embarrassing and unpleasant for
everyone. Learn the best strategies
for overcoming anxiety and being
confident in group settings.
• There are few very nice role-
practices to do it fast.

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• Everyone has that friend who
can walk into a bar and talk to
anybody with ease.
• How do they do it? Learn the
“secrets” for getting people to
like you, instantly and most
important – put them into
practice.
4. Get people to like you instantly.

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TEACHING and PRESENTATION AS SOFT KILLS
Even as a beginner, teaching and presenting are an important skills to have as a developer.
• If you are a beginner or you just started a new job, then you
probably think you have nothing to teach. The reality is that in
most cases you probably do.
• There is nothing wrong to end up equipped with a marker and
draw diagrams on a whiteboard, participating in a brainstorm
sessions, explaining how things work from your perspective or
experience.

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• When we all started our first software development job,
we thought we would spend more time learning from
others. But it’s never the case, right?
• In fact we always fall into the combination of doing both
learning and leaching.
TEACHING and PRESENTATION AS SOFT SKILLS

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In any career, whether it be a developer, a
painter or a writer, an individual’s focus on the
small details can accumulate to greatness.
If you want to produce amazing work, you
need to be alert and fine-tuned.
FOCUS AND SELF ORGANIZING AS SOFT SKILLS

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• As developers, this skill SHOULD NOT be understated.
• Our job is to build useful stuff.
And to create something that is valuable to others can take a lot of time.
One technique you may find useful is the Pomodoro technique.
There are loads of cool versions available online.
FOCUS AND SELF ORGANIZING AS SOFT SKILLS

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THE PO-MO-DO-RO TECHNIQUE

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Here is how it works: in brief
• You set a timer for 25 minutes
• You concentrate on ONE task for that 25 minutes
• After the 25 minutes are up, you take a 5-minute break
• Any thoughts that come to your head that are not related to
the task at hand, you write them down to focus on later.
• You repeat the cycle up to four times (or even more).
• This technique is great because it makes you focus on one
thing at a time. Which helps you produce more meaningful
work

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BIG PICTURE THINKING AS SOFT SKILLS
• If you put the business proposition first, you have a soft skill
that is worth keeping.
Soft skills are difficult to learn, so those who care first about
the product and then about the code they are writing, should
take pride in their not-so-common ability.
• On one hand, things need to ship out to production to help
the business to grow. On the other hand, you have to ensure
your future colleagues are not left with unmaintainable
code. And, of course, the user also has to enjoy the
software.

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LEADERSHIP, STRATEGIC THINKING, DELEGATION AND MOTIVATION
• Leadership - Development of leadership skills, promotion,
• Strategic thinking
• Delegation and motivation
leaders need to be especially agile to stay current with their business as the
pace of change has accelerated so dramatically. Great leadership as a soft skill
also requires not only understanding customers’ current needs, but accurately
predicting future needs as well.

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TROUBLESHOOTING AS SOFT SKILLS
• One of the best parts about being a developer (or QA, or tester, or PM) is
solving problems. But to solve a problem, you must first go on a journey of
finding out what that problem is exactly.
• The easiest thing in the world is to memorize a bunch of commands or copy
and paste code found on Stackoverflow. Yet the real power is knowing the
bigger picture of what’s is going on. If you are tackling a big problem at work,
it is best to break it down into tiny editable pieces.

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When it comes to software development, troubleshooting
problems is everything.
LOOK AT THE CURRENT SOLUTION (IF ONE EXISTS).
CONSIDER HOW THE CURRENT SOLUTION IS SOLVING THE PROBLEM. (IF
IT IS AT ALL.)
Once you get a high-level overview of the application, you can go into
features of the application.
Use the problem, solution, and details technique to further break down
the issue.

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CONCLUSION
• Certain job skills are universal, whether you’re in a tech position or not.
For instance, communication and teamwork.
In a perfect world we all should have realized the importance of these soft
skills before we landed our first job as developers. Our life would be much,
much easier and we would be much, much better not only developers, but
personalities.
These are the 6 most useful soft skills, but here I must mention the ones
that we also should master to make the top 10 soft skills for developers:
- Empathy
- Adaptability
- Attitude
- Critical thinking

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EMPATHY
Putting yourself in other people’s
shoes and trying to understand
their product may be hard,
especially if their code is not easily
understandable or worse —if you
have to write it from scratch.
However, practicing empathy will
help you get over this sort of events
more easily and focus on what
really matters, namely the audience
which uses the product you created.
ADAPTABILITY
This skill should be second nature to
developers because there are always
things to be changed and things to be
learned. Adaptability refers to a software
developer’s openness to learning new
skills, taking on extra responsibilities, even
relocating. One of the most important
aspects of adaptability is the reaction to
change. Do you react positively to
comments, criticism, bad news and other
sorts of uncomfortable situations? If the
answer is yes, you should hold on to this
soft skill; it will come in handy.

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ATTITUDE
Most software developers are lone wolves
and they don’t mind the label as long as
they can write their code without
interruption. Pair programming is not
something many developers like to do,
but that should be perfectly fine as long
as the attitude is the right one. This soft
skill can be improved by offering
suggestions instead of mere criticism,
being more aware of opportunities and
complaining less. Experience shows that
those who have a positive attitude usually
have colleagues that are more willing to
help them.
CRITICAL THINKING
Critical thinking involves assessing
facts before reaching a conclusion.
Software developers are sometimes
faced with a handful of
possible solutions, and only critical
thinking will allow them to quickly
test each scenario mentally before
choosing the most efficient one.
This soft skill is possibly the most
important one because it helps
developers write clean,
maintainable code.

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RECAP OF SOFT SKILLS

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