📌Info
This is English version of the post originally written in Ukrainian.
In addition to the usual division of soft and hard skills, I’d like to attract your attention to the team-technical and individually-ethicalbetter names are very welcome aspects. They somewhat correlate with hard/soft skills but are not identical to them.
Team-technical skills allow one or two specialists in a team to meet a need. For example, if there’s at least one backender in the team, theoretically, the team can handle backend tasks. Of course, the more, the merrier, but in theory, one backender would suffice. Pushing it to the extreme, the rest of the team might have very superficial knowledge of the backend.
✏️Note
A poor man’s analogy: you don’t need to understand how an internal combustion engine works to drive a car.
A couple of repair shops is enough for an entire neighborhood.
You can adopt the latest and greatest technologies; historical context isn’t necessary. If there’s Angular 17 available, you can start directly with A17; there’s no need to start with AngularJS, then migrate to A2, and so on until you reach the current version.
Individually-ethical skills are different. They are necessary for all team members. If only one team member can give feedback properly, while all others start commenting on a pull request with “you moron” the team won’t get far.
❗Important
Being able to give feedback, present ideas, accept criticism, etc. —
these skills should be developed in all team members at a more or less decent level.
Otherwise, the bottleneck effect is be very noticeable for the entire team.
It’s important to note that these skills cannot be implemented “at the end” following the LIFO principle. Unlike traditional “technical” ⚙️-technologies, you can’t immediately become a cool empath; first, you need to understand your own emotions, then learn to grasp the emotional message in your peer’s phrases, only then try to adopt the emotional state of your counterpart. This usually takes much more time than learning a ⚙️-technology.
In conclusion:
- ⚙️-Technologies generate added value.
They can be outsourced.
The ⚙️-pieces can be treated as a product: implement-deliver-forgetuse. - Humanitarian skills prevent messing up in the process of generating that added value.
These skills can’t be outsourced; the team must possess them themselves.
Maintaining and developing such skills is a project (a continuous process).
Don’t mess up on the review!