4 skills you need to be successful in software development

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The article is a half truth. There are 4 skills you need to be successful in software development. Two of these skills are needed to be successful anywhere and they are (1) coherent written & oral communications and (2) working well with others. Any university degree will develop these skills. The other two necessary skills are (3) having broad software development experience (both re/ tasks and teams) and (4) actually knowing the foundations of computer science. A useful programmer can get by for a long time having only skills 1, 2, and 3 but a successful programmer has skill 4. Critical thinking skills alone do not design a successful system nor do they diagnose the root cause of a problem.

I have been developing software programs and software systems for 37 years. I have met lots of very useful software developers in that time. I have met only a handful of successful software developers.

I would never build a team of only useful programmers.