What Makes a Great Software Engineer (Dissertation) (2016) [pdf]

Here are some slides summarizing the shorter paper this is based on:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170809055122id_/https://learni...

tl;dr They did a qualitative survey of what other people think makes a great software engineer at Microsoft.

Their take aways:

- The ability to learn is more important than any individual technical skill

- Making good decisions is rarely discussed in the software engineering literature, but it is critical to being a great software engineer

- Software engineering is a sociotechnical undertaking

- Delivering the code is often insufficient; complex contextual technical considerations abound.

Thats a very handy link, thanks.

The whole 'sociotechnical' part is gaping black hole for most new devs I meet, because it's not taught, and I don't know that schools know how to teach it.

Anyone have any internal processes (or resources) for helping newbs understand that side of the job?

check "recommended readings" on the right:

https://www.svilendobrev.com/rabota/

starting from Organisational patterns, down. Skip anything there about design/ architecture/ math.

But: have in mind Conway's law - software-produced <=> organisation's-culture. So you can't dismiss entirely either of the two extremes of the socio-techical (human-machine) systems.

IMO, Winnie the Pooh has much more sociotechnical hints than CS university course.

Thank you very much, I'll check that out