Software developers need social skills as much as technical skills:
- Pair programming, and not just with your buddy but with everyone on the team.
- Refining your questions to not waste a senior developer's time.
- Answering questions clearly without confusing a junior developer.
When you're hiring or promoting a developer look at the person's social skills. Social skills are easier to quantify than technical skills.
The key is that social skills are within a peer group. You can measure who is the most popular pair programming partner in your company, or which coding bootcamp student helps his or her classmates the most.
Decide the six or eight social skills that your organization values. These can include other peer-observable skills, such as beautiful web design or public speaking.
Set up an account on Bonusly for your team. Each team member gets 200 points each month to spend.
Every day your team members give each other bonus points for social skills such as "Thank you for answering my question," or "Your web design is beautiful!"
Add time management software to track how much time each person spends asking questions, answering questions, reading documentation, etc.
A hiring manager can then access the data and see if a job candidate prefers asking for help or prefers reading documentation. The hiring manager can also zoom out to see the peer group, to see who is the best designer in the group, or who is the most helpful.
Bonusly even has a leaderboard app. You might walk past a monitor and see that you've dropped below the median for helping others, and make an effort to be extra helpful. The skills that a company recognizes and rewards will grow in its employees.
Thomas David Kehoe is looking for a front-end Angular position in Boulder or Denver. His project, resume, and references are at https://crudiest-firebase.firebaseapp.com.
