Developers are in high demand these days, sometimes it’s easy to forget the non-coding skills that make developers succeed, here are non-coding Skills that help you stand out as a developer. We often find ourselves struggling to keep up with the latest frameworks and technologies, leading to a feeling of information overload for anyone encountering these topics for the first time. This is why learning noncoding skills is important.

By developing these skills early on, you’ll be ahead of your peers and able to bring your own unique perspective to the table when it comes time for talking shop with fellow developers.

Non-Coding Skills That Help you stand Out as a Developer

1) Always keep time in online meetings

Timekeeping is a skill that comes in handy both at work and outside of it. Aside from the obvious benefit of showing people that you’re not late, knowing when to arrive on time and when to leave is important. If you have an important obligation happening at another time, you need to let others know right away. A good rule of thumb is to show up 10 minutes early for every meeting and give yourself 10 minutes extra time in case of traffic or other delays.

In addition to this. During online meetings make sure to:

a) Mute yourself when not speaking – it makes it easier to take notes and can prevent you from hearing background noise.
b) Give yourself a timeframe for discussion – it will help you keep track of time, and ensure that you leave on time.
c) Turn off other tabs – this helps to prevent distractions during meetings so that people are able to see your face when they’re speaking.
d) Avoid interrupting the speaker – this is the more important of the three, in part because interrupting removes that face to face interaction. We often find ourselves in a meeting where people have been speaking for 15 minutes without having gotten to any new topics. If you can not afford to waste time by making the person talking wait for you, this is not a good place to be.

2) Learn how to work with remote colleagues

Remote work is becoming more and more popular, particularly for positions that don’t require an on-site presence. However, there are still a number of misconceptions about remote work floating around that can make it difficult to work seamlessly with people outside of the office.

For example, if you’re used to working in a cubicle farm you might assume that you can’t be productive unless your co-workers are nearby. The truth is that online collaboration tools like Slack and Google Hangouts make it easy to communicate with remote colleagues and listen to them while they talk. Another common misconception is that remote workers won’t be able to get things done as quickly as their co-workers in the office.

In order to work effectively with other colleagues, you could try some of these tips.

a) Always respond with adequate information to a message – this ensures that the other person knows when you’ve read their message and can respond accordingly.
b) Ask questions to make sure you understand before saying anything – this not only helps you make sure that you’re talking about the same thing as the other person, but also makes it easier to get their perspective.
c) Don’t take things personally – when you’re communicating with others who are far away from the office, it can be easy to take things too personally. While it’s natural to want things to go smoothly and for everyone involved to be happy, remote work is a lot like any other collaboration in its essence of teamwork.
d) Enable your video when necessary – sometimes it can be easier to get a point across with video rather than text, especially when you’re meeting with somebody for the first time. This is something that you can enable on Skype and Google Hangout, for example.
e) Don’t forget about lunch and coffee breaks – not everybody works at the same pace or in the same time zone, so try to avoid interrupting them during their break times.

3) Always offer opinions or acknowledge others’ opinions

Here’s another one that might seem counterintuitive: You’ll often find yourself working with developers whose jobs are more focused on management and UX design than anything else. It’s tempting to think that you don’t need to offer opinions or share any of the work you do, but this can actually hurt you in the long run because it prevents your full potential from being realized.

4) Learn time management and prioritization

As a developer, it’s easy to get caught up in the notion that working hard is the only way to succeed. Putting in long hours and studying all the time is what everybody expects of us, however. In order to realize your full potential, you need to put some effort into your personal time management.
The best way to make sure you get more done is by being disciplined with your time management and prioritization.

In order to do this, a lot of you will need to get in the habit of closely monitoring your time. Tracing how much time is available for each task and setting specific times for doing each task, helps you to reach your targets more efficiently.

It also helps you avoid missing out on opportunities because you let distractions in from other areas of your life. The best way to do this is by creating a robust work-life balance which involves making sure that you’re not neglecting any important tasks because of the demands outside the office.

5) Respond to messages as soon as possible

As a developer, you’re going to find yourself in plenty of situations where you’ll have to interact with customers, clients or partners. Your customers aren’t always going to be willing to wait for an answer and will likely put pressure on you if you keep them waiting for more than a few hours. Make it a habit to respond to messages as soon as you can. Don’t be afraid to ask both your clients and your customers if they would like to hang out in a chat or launch call instead of sending you an email because this will help you control the relationship better.

6) Talk about important things with your colleagues

At the office, it’s easy for people to feel like they don’t have time for socializing, especially if they are working on long projects. However, remote work can make it difficult to get together with other people because it can feel like nobody is available unless you’re online all the time.

The best way to avoid this is by making it a point to talk about important things with your colleagues. However, you’ll find that more often than not, your workmates have interesting perspectives on everything from life in general to the latest project and you can learn a lot from them by getting together for a coffee every once in a while.

7) Think before you speak

If there’s one piece of advice that works for everything from workplace relationships to business deals, it is this: Think before you speak. This can help both you and the people around you get fewer jibes or miscommunications in what could otherwise be a potential disaster.

Conclusion

One final piece of advice is to make sure that you’re not afraid of the learn-by-doing philosophy. It can be tempting to think that by gaining experience through your own mistakes that it’s somehow less valuable or less legitimate than getting information from other sources.

You might be interested in how to use debuggers to test software.