Often neglected skills new and junior web developers should learn? | Hacker News Reader

Often neglected skills new and junior web developers should learn?

13 pointscmorgan85064 comments

Obviously learning to program is only one part of the equation when learning to become a Web Developer.

What are some skills, concepts, tools, etc that often seem neglected and should be learned by new/junior developers to help them in the early parts of their career?

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1) How to communicate with people. Master that and the world is your oyster, minimize/ignore it and you're setting yourself up for a lifetime of subpar results and hand wringing.

2) cli tools (make/awk/sed/etc, getting just a base proficiency pays huge dividends in time savings over a career)

3) excel. Nearly all things business start and end with a spreadsheet, be able to at least stumble through one and understand the information it contains and the functions being applied.

I'm going to second communication skills. Soft skills can be much more important than hard skills for getting a job, keeping a job, and moving up.

Speaking as a junior dev who recently became a mid-level dev (although I still have some junior tendencies to iron out), learning how to solve problems is something that held me back.

When I was given tasks I would worry about the code itself and the stuff I didn't know instead of trying to clearly understand the problem and come up with different solutions.

Its essential in my opinion , for junior web developers to familiarize themselves with the excellent resources and forums existing on the web easily searchable via few keystrokes on google. In addition to just visiting these websites just to search for solutions, they should also try and contribute , to understand that software development requires a highly collaborative environment to solve some of the most complex problems out there. This applies to both online and offline, where crowd sourcing a problem enables us to look at it from different perspectives and get to the most optimal solutions. These skills , they need to start teaching in colleges.

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