Great engineering

Coding is not just another job. In the right environment, writing software can be really fun and, even more, it can be your personal hobby as well! So… you might be focused on coding, coding and more coding to level up your own career skills.

That itself is not bad at all! Practice makes the master, so a lot of coding will inevitably help you improve your coding skills… but there are other aspects that you need to keep in mind in order to help you grow into a great engineer.

As a software engineer, your job is not “just to write software” -for its own sake, but to use software to solve actual business problems. To make that happen there are plenty of different methodologies out there, for sure. However, we must agree that you need to identify and understand your customer’s needs in order to know what to actually build.

You need to know your product, at least until certain level, so you can design your software using a similar language closer to the business, which will help its evolution and overall quality. This will be beneficial for the future (and present) maintenance of the product.

IT, Software, Product and People topics are highly interconnected, and having at least a common ground of understanding the relation between these can help the overall goal of every single individual.

The result of a great team work is not equal as the sum of the individual parts, as it’s multiplying the created value among their peers. To that, great communication skills are a key part of it in order to create as much clarity as possible from any different abstraction level.

That’s why a great engineer is a knowledgeable person about business, customer, product, and coding. Understanding these points have a strong impact on your daily work as it creates a difference between the average and the great engineer.

Image original by Nicola Ballotta.

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