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Comment by jknoepfler | Hacker News Reader

There is no single thing. There's a grocery list. It starts with:

1. Finish shit on time.

Has a bunch of things that mean: 2...99...: Understand to the best of your ability what you finished, how it fits into your business, and what could be done better.

And ends with the most important rule:

100: Don't be an asshole

edit: 101: proofread what you write

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Note that "Finish shit on time" is almost a subset of "being able to estimate well". Having mentored and hired more than a few junior devs, if I could stress ONE thing to make them better developers, it would be to focus on figuring out how to estimate accurately.

Estimating accurately has a variety of criteria, like knowing the system you're developing against well enough to understand pitfalls and hurdles, knowing how much time will be spent discussing the task at hand, etc. It's not just "this is how long it will take me to write <x> function"... but it is absolutely critical to getting shit done on time, as it literally helps you define what on time is.

On a related note, the concept of "underpromise and overdeliver" is useful to internalize here. Delivering a product early / below budget after a high estimate is usually a lot better than delivering a product late / above budget after a low estimate.

Co-signing this. Showing that you understand the business you're in and being able to propose and build solutions that best fit the business is a good way to get noticed.

Also don't deliver buggy code.

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