You need a variety of skills to be a software engineer. I've had the pleasure of working with people🌎. They've all had diverse backgrounds and experiences. I've enjoyed working with some😊, and some of them I have not😞. With this bit of experience, I have arranged a few skills that made me want to work with some people more than others.

I enjoy working with engineers who have these skills:

• 🙂 Friendly and easy to communicate with
• 👂 Listen to others and try to see things from other perspectives
• ✍️ Thorough in their work
• 👫 Team player, striving to put the team first
• 💪🤙 Strong opinions, loosely held
• 👩‍🏫 Wants to learn
• 🙋 Asks a lot of questions(not silly questions)

Each of these skills is a soft skill as you can see. Who would you prefer to work with? Someone who's not that great of a programmer, but working to be, and is a team player. Or someone who's a "rockstar programmer" and doesn't listen to others?

It is easy to find articles and blog posts about how to improve your technical skills. While they are useful and you should read them, the soft skills are just as important, if not more! Technical skills are something that anyone can learn. Soft skills are something that might take time to develop (speaking from personal experience).

So now I'm curious, what skills do you think makes a great software engineer? 😊