Ask HN: What specific skill has had the biggest impact in your career?

2 pointsAnon842 comments

I'm curious what specific skill has had the biggest impact in you, career wise. Ideally, answers will focus on __specific__ things that can/were learned in relatively short periods of time.

In my case, I would probably say command line programming in awk. It's something you can master in an afternoon or two and that will save you countless hours for decades to come.

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I don't have a good answer for this, but I find the notion that you can learn something in just a few hours that will profoundly impact your career intriguing.

Interpersonal skills (re: AwesomeFaic), grokking bureaucracy, learning how to learn are all career-long pursuits that define most careers (I would argue).

Tools like awk and sed are great but ultimately of marginal importance to the average developer. In fact, I haven't even found the sum of all similar efficiencies to be worth dealing with.

As a developer, practicing articulation and interpersonal skills has advanced my career more than any specific technology. I've gotten jobs because I was the most memorable and pleasant to be around, more so than explicitly being the strongest developer (although I obviously keep relevant skills up to date, too)

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