People often ask: “What do I need to be a computer programmer?” Usually in such a situation they expect to get a step-by-step programming learning plan. But there’s also another answer to this important question, which you’ll find in this article.
If you’re thinking about becoming a professional software developer, check out the following list of five qualities that will help you succeed in this profession.
1. Logical thinking
Logical thinking is the main tool for a software developer. Basically, a programmer tells a computer a sequence of steps to perform in order to achieve some result: to compute numbers, to show data, etc.
That’s pretty much it. No magic, no sorcery. Just logic. The logic has to be as clear as possible, because the computer by its nature doesn’t understand shades of meanings yet, so you must be able to tell it exactly what you want.
If you don’t do this, then a machine will give you a result you don’t expect. This is when computer bugs are born.
It is also believed that a programmer has to be very good at math. But if you plan on working on typical websites or quite regular web apps and mobile applications, there will be little to zero math involved into this process.
Yes, it’s still very helpful to have a solid mathematical background if you want to be a programmer, because math is a brilliant tool to enrich your analytical abilities. But it’s not so crucial for most software developers to be good at math these days. Of course, unless your goal is to work on projects that heavily depend on it, like neural networks or complex 3D games.
2. Perseverance
As a programmer, most of the time you have to sit on your chair meticulously doing your job, having put aside everything else (maybe, except for music, which helps many developers to focus on their tasks). Otherwise you won’t do your job in time, since the software development schedule is almost always tight.
This can be pretty difficult for people with short attention spans. Fortunately, in many cases the ability to work being focused on a particular task for a long period of time is a skill that can be significantly developed if you use the right approach, like the Pomodoro Technique.
3. Readiness for constant self-education
Nobody can learn programming once and for all. There’s way too much information about it to be learned beforehand. You have to learn something new every time you solve a problem of a kind you never faced before.
Also, although the basic programming concepts and the popular programming languages can remain almost intact for decades, particular tools software developers use in their work (for example, frameworks) exist in the process of constant change.
New frameworks emerge quite often, replacing the old ones. Moreover, once in a while even some programming languages get outdated, so programmers that use them must completely change their set of tools.
In order to keep your knowledge and skills up-to-date, you must be able to regularly improve them with video tutorials, books, official documentation, and other learning materials.
4. Calmness and optimism
In a perfect world a programmer writes code that always works as expected. But the reality is a little bit different. While coding, you’ll be making mistakes, both logical and typos. This is a human nature, we just can’t help it.
Sometimes these mistakes are pretty obvious, and the computer is smart enough to recognize them and explicitly tell you something like “you missed a semicolon in line 25”. In such a situation you usually facepalm, fix it, and everything is fine.
But sometimes you have literally no idea why your app doesn’t work. It seems like you’ve done everything right, you see no flaws in your code, but it is still buggy. It’s like hitting the brick wall, you just don’t know what to do next.
Eventually you’ll figure it out, of course. But it will require some time to be spent in this personal programmer’s nightmare, and you must always be optimistic that you can get out of it.
This is really annoying, but you must be prepared to spend a significant amount of your time specifically on this kind of issues. It’s not a rare situation when finding bugs takes even more time than writing new code for new functionality of a product.
5. Readiness for hard brainwork with possible overtimes
The most difficult part of programmer’s job is not writing code, if you’re focusing on the word “writing”. Actually, the process of writing code itself doesn’t take much time. An average software developer writes several dozen to several hundred lines of code every day.
The main challenge is to think of what exactly you should write. A developer can easily spend hours just thinking, or reading technical documentation and thinking, and this process consumes a great deal of energy.
Things get particularly intense when the project must be released soon, but it’s far from being completed. This is a pretty typical scenario, especially in startups and the game development industry.
It’s always hard to estimate accurately how much time it will take to create a new software product. Unlike, for example, the building construction process, where you can calculate how much concrete and steel you’re going to use in your project, and, accordingly, how many hours workers need in order to use these building materials, in the process of software development usually there are no such easily measurable elements.
And since there are no straightforward principles of calculating how much time it will take to develop from scratch some application, it always seems easier and quicker than it really is. So project managers and programmers usually are way too optimistic when they prepare their plans.
There’s often an illusion that a project can be developed three to five times quicker compared to the time it requires in reality. If the development process time estimates are defined by an inexperienced project manager, developer, or even a client, you’ll inevitably fall into this trap. As a result, you simply cannot keep up with the pace of the process planned and have to work overtime.
Often clients or managers simply don’t know how difficult it can be to add to the application “just one button” they are talking about. It seems like it’s not a big deal and it will take only five minutes.
But the truth is that to add this button a programmer must write several hundred lines of code to make this button work. And this must be done very carefully, so that nothing breaks in the application due to this small change.
Such a tiny task can take several days, but in the schedule you might see several hours, which also leads to overtimes.
Of course, there are plenty of well-managed companies where serene and relaxed developers work nine to five, but it’s not that unusual for programmers to work more than average.