In my career, I have met many professionals who are very technically sound and have a good grasp and professional knowledge of their fields and technologies. However, due to lack of soft skills, they missed promotion, on-site opportunities, and advanced skills. Technical interviews and career opportunities. Shocked, but you can’t get promoted if you have good skills?
It is true, my dear friend: As global trends continue to change, companies are looking for professionals with excellent technology and excellent soft skills to join their teams.
In this article, we try to share some key basic soft skills, which we think are required in the DevOps role, or in fact, in any software profile. Take a look and try to develop them as part of your personality.
According to Google, "soft skills" refer to "personal qualities that enable a person to interact effectively and harmoniously with others." For example, you may neglect group study when you go to college. In those days, team work was the most tedious task. However, in the "real world", collaborating with others and entrusting tasks to everyone is necessary in DevOps.
The most successful DevOps engineers are not only the solvers of difficult and miscellaneous problems, but also excellent communicators, empathizers and leaders. As the future of DevOps will be dominated by artificial intelligence, soft skills will become more critical. Soft skills will determine whether you can work well with colleagues. In short, it means whether you are suitable for this company.
Let's look at some of the important soft skills needed to become a DevOps expert in 2021.
1. Empathy
Day-to-day empathy only refers to how you understand the opinions of others, while empathy in DevOps is to put yourself in the position of colleagues and customers for empathy.
Approaching colleagues in a friendly tone rather than aggressive tone will help create a harmonious work environment. In an understanding and friendly environment, it is much easier to come up with new ideas. If you don’t like someone’s idea, then give your feedback some positive suggestions. Later you can explain what you don’t like and end with another positive thing. When expressing different opinions, you can take the form of "yes first and then no", but not "yes......but", but "yes......and", that is, "I think you did a good job... if so, it would be better." "Sentence pattern.
By establishing this empathy with the customer, you can ensure that the product or service meets the customer's needs. For example, if your website has a high click-through rate, it means that you are prioritizing the needs of potential customers.
2. Teamwork
Developers do work independently for most of their time, but in many cases developers must also work or interact with other members of the team, such as pair programming in Extreme Programming. Cooperating with others will make your work more interesting, and you may also benefit from future work.
Working with a team is usually the best way to create a coherent product. For developers, it is always a good idea to keep in touch with colleagues. If you can’t communicate face-to-face with team members, you can use an online application to keep in touch and update.
3. Patience
Being patient with colleagues is the key to the team working together in a DevOps environment. You may be the best programmer on the team, but if you treat other team members well, the technology will be meaningless, because developers are not alone working on the same project, they cannot do without teamwork. Therefore, as a developer, patience and perseverance will enable you to go further.
Patience in the face of difficulties and adversity is what employers need. Taking time to answer every question and solve every difficulty will remove many obstacles for future work.
4. Adaptability
Adaptability is one of the most important soft skills in DevOps. As a technology house, we know that software and hardware are constantly evolving. However, there are still many experienced developers struggling to keep up with the pace of new programming languages, frameworks and tools.
Therefore, developers must regularly invest in updating their skills. But how to express your adaptability? There are several ways:
● Prove your adaptability through hard skills, learn a new programming language or a new skill. This proves that you have strong adaptability and learning ability.
● You can add more data to the work experience section of your resume to prove your adaptability. This will show that you are fully capable of adapting to learning new things and evolving in different environments.
● Explain how much you like teamwork and how comfortable it is for others to work together.
5. Sense of Responsibility
Responsibility means taking responsibility for all your mistakes. When you ignore your mistakes, you or other team members may make the same mistake again. Acknowledging your mistakes is not easy, but in the long run, this will be the best thing you can do for your team. Therefore, the courage to take responsibility is essential for any leader. If you are brave enough to admit your mistakes, your team will be encouraged to do so. In the end, everyone will use this soft skill to use this mistake to analyze what went wrong and how to avoid such mistakes in the future.
6. Time management
Effectively managing your time allows developers to focus on important tasks and complete tasks more efficiently. When you have a lot of things to do, managing time can be difficult. Reasonable arrangement of priorities, Pomodoro Techniques and other small skills can effectively manage your time.
Time management allows you to work for a fixed period of time and take a break if necessary. In addition, try to avoid multitasking, because it is detrimental to work efficiency. "Stop starting, start finishing", by reducing the work-in-progress, allowing oneself to concentrate on a job will greatly improve work efficiency.
7. Efficient communication
Whether working full-time or part-time, communication skills are key skills that need to be developed. This is crucial even when working remotely. Developers/DevOps professionals should know how to communicate with people of various backgrounds and cultures.
For developers, it’s also important to understand people’s emotions, what they say, and what they say.
In many cases, it is necessary to interact with written communication methods such as email and instant messaging, so concise writing skills at this time are also crucial for DevOps professionals.
in conclusion
To sum up, in order to succeed in the DevOps field, a person must possess the above-mentioned soft skills in addition to strong skills and DevOps tools and techniques.
This article is translated from: https://dzone.com/articles/essential-soft-skills-needed-to-become-a-devops-pr
We have produced a "Programmer's Survival Handbook", which coincides with the above point of view. In fact, not only DevOps, all programmers need to pay attention to the cultivation of soft skills while emphasizing hard skills. The content of the "Handbook" is more substantial than this article, and it gives a practical and effective career development route.
The "Programmer Survival Manual" introduces relevant knowledge from five parts: skills, methods, development planning, resources, and management, covering every programmer from entering the industry to preparing for transformation, and finally realizing himself The whole process of life value. I hope to provide every programmer who reads this manual with some new ways to improve their abilities, as well as new ideas for career planning.
The paper version is now out of print. Those who are interested can get the electronic version here: https://www.zentao.net/download/80328.html
You can also come to GitHub to contribute to the manual: https://github.com/easysoft/zendevelopper