| This is what I've noticed as well. Most devs can't communicate for shit. Being able to just talk is often enough to get your foot in the door. It also has the added bonus of giving you more power in the workplace. If you can communicate well, you can get more ideas on the table and implemented. The more ideas you implement, the higher your worth clearly is. The other thing I'd note is that your raw dev skills are a product of how much effort you put in. If you do dev purely as a job (minimal pre-job training and relying solely on on-the-job training and experience to keep up) you're going to be stuck as a mediocre dev. To be truly successful you need to be seeking and actively consuming knowledge all the time (at least in your early career). This means keeping up with your chosen dev scene and languages, and actually playing with them and learning them in your own time. Companies value someone who knows their shit, knows it well, and can communicate how to apply that shit to their product. I think being a dev is a unique career because unlike most, there aren't just a few advancements every year to care about, there's several every month. And those advancements aren't just something you can maybe do in the future once a paper is vetted and reviewed, they're things you can read about, toy with and probably apply to your product straight away. |