Evolution of a Developer: From Coding to Leading

Quite a lot of beginner specialists start their work under the supervision of their more experienced colleagues. It is a normal process in many areas, including software engineering. Let us track the evolution of an average developer and see the progress.

Technical Responsibility

In the very beginning, a developer starts his way with only or mostly technical responsibilities. They include coding, testing, maintaining the development environment, technical infrastructure activities, and so on. These activities require a certain level of technical knowledge and experience, so a developer may spend a significant amount of time learning to do that. Usually, it takes is up to five years to become an expert in some technical area.

The critical aspect of this phase is the fact that a developer concentrates on the technical solution. In other words, he is trying to do his best to implement requirements and build a reliable solution. At this point, the developer requires good technical skills and below-average communication skills to do his work as a part of the team.

Organizational Work

The next significant type of activity a developer starts handling is organizational activities. They often include managing and leading teams of developers, organizing their internal processes, managing external communication. These activities often require technical and organizational skills, so the person who is doing that should have a technical background, some leadership skills, and necessary social skills to organize internal and external communication. Such a person may spend half or even more time talking with employees, clarifying the needs, setting up processes, conducting interviews, and so on.

These new responsibilities often do not replace technical responsibilities but rather complement them. This person has to have social skills to talk to people all the time and solve their problems. Unlike the strictly technical person, this organizer usually concentrates on the processes and the most efficient way to manage people. Technical skills are still crucial, but they are slowly became substituted with social skills.

Business Activities

Sooner or later, the developers come to the point when he has enough experience to help customers and manage business processes. These business activities are the third iteration of development evolution.

Experienced developers may handle technical and organizational tasks and analyze the customer’s requirements and propose the best way to implement them. Such advisory may include only the technical part (tell the customer how to do what he wants), but more often includes a business part (propose the best solution for the business problem). Consequently, such recommendations are usually much more valuable because they may save a lot of time and money initially, even before organizational and technical parts.

In addition to technical and communication skills, these activities require a certain level of business knowledge and some experience in marketing, operations, and finances. The developer now has to concentrate on solving the problem and achieving results to help the customer as much as he can.

At this level, the developer has to have a complex vision of customer business, existing problems, and possible solutions. Knowing and understanding that he can evaluate different ways to solve known problems, predict possible consequences, and recommend the best long-term solution. Such a recommendation is precious as it takes into account all business processes and stimulates company growth.