DEV Community

atabakoff
atabakoff

Posted on

5 personality traits that will hold you back as a developer

  1. Lack of sense of humor - appropriate jokes make communication more pleasant and as a result more effective. No one wants to work with a robot or worse, a person got triggered by a harmless joke.
  2. Being defensive - feedback is necessary to grow and defensiveness prevents from accepting & addressing the feedback and consequently from the growth.
  3. Vindictiveness - sometimes people do offend you but in 99% it's unintentional. Either way, going berserk after them will prevent you from the actual work, worsen the communication and overall productivity of you, the team and everyone else involved.
  4. Absence of self-irony - we are human and occasionally we make stupid mistakes. The presence of self-irony allows to recognize the situation, joke about it and move forward with a good mood.
  5. Lack of self-reflection - one who wants to grow must reflect on both what he did & what feedback he got. Going back to this in a month, 3 months, 6 months gives you a different perspective and provides helpful insights. It's like a great book - to fully grasp it you read it the second & third time.

All the great engineers I worked with have excellent sense of humor & self-irony, they never defensive and they regularly reflect on their own performance & development. They appreciate the feedback & strive to address it.

Anything I missed?

Top comments (5)

Collapse
 
rajaerobinson profile image
Rajae Robinson

Great post. I would also add "Arrogance". I think most developers are intellectually gifted in some way and so some of them try way too hard to sound smart and to be correct every single time.

Collapse
 
chiragagg5k profile image
Chirag Aggarwal

Great post ⭐️

Collapse
 
tailcall profile image
Maria Zaitseva

Thanks for sharing this! It's important to not just be a good engineer, but a good person as well.

Collapse
 
jonrandy profile image
Jon Randy 🎖️

Incuriosity - blind wrote learning and unquestioning acceptance will leave you without a true understanding of how stuff actually works

Collapse
 
fauzitsani profile image
fauzi-tsani

More to add in my to do list on personal growth!