10 Traits That Separate the Best Devs From the Crowd

In a Nutshell

• We work hard to improve our tech and soft skills. But our character traits, our mindset - we take it for granted. An innate, fixed part of who we are. And thus, we let it run on autopilot.
• This way of thinking is harmful. Not only is your mindset critical for a successful software development career (maybe even more than your skills), but it's also under your control.
• True senior devs acknowledge that character traits are malleable, are self-aware of their mindset, and deliberately work on it. This is the superpower that makes them stand out from the crowd and accelerates their career.
• In this post, I'll discuss the 10 most critical traits of a successful developer, why they are important, and share a few tips on how you can shape them.

Three Things You Need To Succeed as a Software Developer

Professional software development is a complex discipline that requires a diverse set of abilities to succeed. We can group them into three main categories:

Technical Skills

This is the most obvious group. To be a successful developer, you need to be good at your trade: programming languages and frameworks, clean code principles, architecture, testing, debugging, and so on. You also need to be skillful with your tools: version control, command line, and IDE.

However, technical skills alone won't get you far in a professional, team-based setup. That's why you also need soft skills.

Soft Skills

To be able to work on big, commercial projects, you need a solid set of soft skills: teamwork, communication, project management and planning, remote work, self-organization, learning, personal productivity, and similar.

Many of us find these skills less fun than the technical ones, and thus we often neglect them - so they can already separate solid, professional developers from the crowd. But at least we acknowledge them.

There's also a third category, though, which is equally important but flies under the radar of almost all, even the otherwise good, developers.

Mindset

Mindset is kinda similar to soft skills, but the "skills" it's comprised of are more fundamental, core traits: curiosity, patience, empathy, grit, adaptability, and so on.

On some level, we know these traits are important for a successful software development career. But because they seem an innate, fixed part of our personality, we do not attempt to deliberately learn them in the same way we learn project management or personal productivity techniques.

This makes us blind to a huge and important part of our skillset and can badly hurt our progression.

Why Being Blind to Your Mindset Can Jeopardize Your Career

Software development is a complex, sometimes frustrating, and insanely fast-moving field. Learning, growing, and staying relevant as a developer (and not burning out in the process) requires a specific mix of character traits.

At the same time, it's a 100% team game. Lone-wolf hackers have no place in professional software development, no matter how good they are technically. And functioning well in a team requires another, seemingly opposite, set of traits.

Mindset is something different than skills. Understanding Agile development principles is not the same as being adaptable and open to frequent change. And knowing the debugging techniques is not the same as having the curiosity and persistence to actually enjoy chasing the problem for several hours without getting burned out or discouraged. But while these traits may seem fixed, and innate to our personality, they are equally learnable as skills.

Without understanding what traits are critical for a programmer and deliberately honing them over time, you'll never reach your full potential. True senior developers know this, are self-aware of their mindset, and continuously work on improving it. This is the differentiator, the superpower that separates the best developers from the crowd.

Ok, but which traits are the most important? Let's dive a bit deeper into the details.

Ten Traits of a True Senior Developer

1. Curiosity

If I had to summarize in one sentence what software development is about, I'd say it's about learning. You need to stay up-to-date with constantly evolving technologies and software development processes. You need to learn the deep details of complex business domains (several ones throughout your career). Analyzing and clarifying requirements is learning. Research is learning. Performance optimization and debugging - in other words, poking deeply into the inner workings of code - is a kind of learning as well.

Software development is also about working with people (and for people). You'll be working on cross-functional teams with a diverse set of people from different specializations and backgrounds (nowadays, in the age of remote, most probably from multiple countries and cultures). You'll have to understand "business." You'll have to understand and solve user pain points and problems.

Without a healthy dose of curiosity, you'll not only be less effective at all those things, but you'll also burn out pretty quickly.

2. Affinity for Problem-Solving

Software development is a giant puzzle — an infinite stream of problems to solve. The reason you are hired as a developer is to solve your company's and customers' problems. To do this, you need to solve organizational problems (how to function as a team, how to organize your work, what processes to use) and technical problems (logic, architecture, performance, and so on). These problems consist of even smaller, nested problems, down to atomic problems like how to design and name a particular function or unit test.

If you don't enjoy solving such puzzles, if you don't have a knack for breaking down and untangling problems, your software development career will be a struggle.

3. Patience

Becoming a true senior developer requires years of deliberate practice. You'll also experience a lot of setbacks along the way. Developing your career is rewarding but also a slow and sometimes painful process. To achieve excellence and get to the top, you must be ready for lifelong dedication. And this requires a lot of patience.

Patience is also critical for a lot of things adjacent to our job: handling technical support, working with not-very-tech-savvy users, and coping with organizational bureaucracy. Plus, it's a great problem-solving aid. And you won't sustain working in such a fast-moving, constantly changing industry as tech without patience.

4. Grit (In Just the Right Amount)

Software development requires a lot of persistence. Hunting bugs. Deciphering poorly documented APIs and libraries. Untangling legacy code. Tracking down performance bottlenecks. Even simply sustaining a deep focus for extended periods of time.

You'll struggle, fail, and get stuck, and get frustrated a lot — no matter how senior you are. And you'll need a lot of grit to plow through and not get burned out.

But you also need to understand what's the right amount of grit. What's the sweet spot between unproductively banging your head against the wall for hours and days vs. constantly disrupting your team by requesting assistance immediately when you hit even the smallest bump in the road?

5. Emotional Intelligence

Software development revolves around people and teams. You'll work very closely with your colleagues at an individual level: pair programs, debug together, and review their code. You'll also work with them in a team setup: brainstorm, plan, and make decisions as a group. And this collaboration is messy: your work will overlap or conflict, and you'll have different opinions. You'll negotiate your roadmap with management. Finally, to build a great product, you'll have to put yourself in your users' shoes.

On top of that, all these people come from diverse backgrounds, both technical and non-technical. They are passionate. They have strong opinions. They may sometimes have difficult characters. And your success as a developer depends on how well you can build rapport with them. Without high emotional intelligence, it'll simply be impossible.

6. Ability To Keep Your Ego in Check

Software development (and working in a team in general) is a balancing act. On one hand, you're hired for your expertise. You're expected to have strong opinions and to guide less tech-savvy or more junior people. On the other hand, you'll work with equally experienced and opinionated teammates, who will challenge your point of view and with whom you'll have to make group decisions.

Your ego will often get hurt in the process. You must be able to keep it in check - but without getting withdrawn and disengaged.

You must be opinionated but not zealot. Have a strong point of view but hold it weakly, be open to getting convinced otherwise. You must be ready to defend your opinion but also know when to let go, to not be a condescending, brilliant jerk. You need to respect the team, business, and customers. Be able to disagree but commit. And gracefully take constructive (and even purely negative) feedback. Otherwise, you won't be able to effectively work in a team.

7. Adaptability

Everything in software development is moving so fast. Technologies are constantly changing. New methodologies get popular. Companies pivot.

Throughout your career, you'll also be changing projects, teams, companies, and business domains. Even a single project is a constant act of inspecting and adapting (especially in agile approaches). And your team will constantly self-reorganize, too.

Most people are allergic to change. Change is hard. It's uncomfortable. It's stressful. Being adaptable and open to change will instantly set you apart. It will not only let you climb to the top of the seniority ladder, but it will also let you stay there for a long time.

8. Reliability

I'm repeating it ad nauseam, but software development is a team game. Your colleagues, manager, and company - they all count on you to do your part. Nobody will ever consider you a true senior developer - no matter your tech expertise - if they can't rely on you to take care of your work and deliver on your promises without having to be micromanaged.

It doesn't mean you can never make any mistakes. Failures happen. And the best companies see them as valuable learning opportunities. But to enable this, you need to be able to pick up a dropped ball, gracefully recover, and be trusted to learn from your failure and not repeat it in the future.

9. Pragmatism

Professional software development is an art of tradeoffs. You constantly need to compromise between development speed and quality. Balance new and promising with proven and stable. Walk a thin line between under- and over-engineering.

To succeed in professional software development, you need to be very pragmatic. You need to understand that nothing is black and white and that no principle or pattern holds true in every situation. You must have great intuition for making tradeoffs between different approaches, technologies, and solutions; feel comfortable cutting corners but have a good sense of how much.

10. Positive Outlook

Your life as a programmer is not all sunshine and rainbows. You'll meet annoying customers. Face tight deadlines. Your project may get canceled. You may disagree with your team or management but still have to commit and execute. You'll also work with ugly code. (Yes, every codebase has good and bad parts, even at the top companies like Google.)

You'll get tired, frustrated, and upset.

If you let negativity take over, if you start criticizing and complaining, you'll not only demotivate yourself, but you'll also kill the morale of your team - which won't take your career very far.

You need to be biased toward the positive. Be optimistic and cheerful. Always look for a silver lining. Be the person who rallies their team, kills the bad mood, and restores morale. It'll not only get you noticed and promoted, but it'll also make your career more pleasant and sustainable.

Bonus: A Few Tips on How to Deliberately Shape Your Mindset

Skills, obviously, can be trained - both soft and technical ones. You can get better at debugging as well as at communication. But what about such seemingly innate traits like curiosity or a positive outlook? Can you really train yourself to be more optimistic or curious?

Yes, you can! This is a vast topic, worth several books ("Mindset" by Carol S. Dweck is a great starting point). But let me quickly share a couple of tips:

• Acknowledge that your mindset is not fixed and that your traits are malleable.
• Build self-awareness. Observe how you react in different situations. Try to understand what makes you feel in a particular way (curious vs. bored, positive vs. grumpy, eager vs. defensive).
• Retrospect your behavior from a perspective of a day or two. Was your opinion really pragmatic, or was it your ego talking? How could you have acted differently?
• Prepare in advance. Pre-plan up-front how you'll behave next time in a similar situation and identify the right trigger that will remind you about your plan when the time comes.
• Expose yourself to situations that will let you exercise and strengthen desired traits. Actively look for such opportunities.
• Focus on a single trait for some time. It will make it easier to find opportunities to exercise it and to increase your self-awareness of this trait.
• Reframe. Be conscious and deliberate about how you talk to yourself. The idea isn't stupid; it's surprising. That shiver isn't anxiety; it's excitement. The problem isn't frustrating; it's interesting.
• Enlist help. Don't shy from asking your colleague or manager for feedback - or even to become your "accountability partner" who will catch and point out your unwanted behavior.

I also encourage you to learn a bit about cognitive biases and habit forming. This is a well-developed discipline with a huge body of knowledge and pretty fun to explore.

Bottom Line

If you want to be a true senior developer, you have to be a complete one. You must have the right mix of tech skills, soft skills, and character traits, and you can't ignore any part of this trio.

Character traits are the most tricky part. Most developers neglect them because they are either not self-aware of them, don't know which ones are important, or don't believe they are malleable.

But if you can overcome this flawed way of thinking — if you can change your mindset — you can turn it into a superpower that will elevate your career and make you truly stand out.