The 7 Traits of the Top 10% Developers
and the simple ways to learn them
Welcome to the next issue of The Code.Lead.Succeed newsletter. Today, I’ll share what I’ve seen the top Software Engineers have in common and what differentiates them from the rest.
I have always focused on striving to be the best possible version of myself. The best way I found is to look at people who already achieved that and do what they do. In my coaching, I refer to that as passing The Duck Test. If you look like the best, behave like the best and deliver results like the best - you must be among the best.
Each of the traits and skills is a spectrum. It’s not about having it or not but how much you have it. When you want to follow this path, take it one at a time and every time you level up, it will make you a better engineer and leader. Not many people have them, and the success of each organisation relies on them. Because of the rarity and demand it makes them the best paid skills in Software Engineering.
Strong opinions loosely held
Top developers are opinionated. I like to say I’m hired and paid good money for a reason. Each time you deliver a feature, you gain a point of experience of what works. If your project fails, you gain a point in what not to do. Each time you listen to other developers’ stories, you earn even more points in a shorter time as they did the work already, and you consume the learnings.
Loosely held means accepting you can be wrong. You make your best bet the solution will work but when confronted with data or opinions that contradict it you can change your mind in an instant.
How to learn
In any meeting, you share your opinion. Do your research to build conviction that you’re right. When your opinion isn’t the one being implemented learn why the other one was chosen. Remember it’s about learning what’s the best solution for the problem, not about being right.
Focus on impact
Writing Software isn’t about software. You write it for two possible reasons:
To increase the value of the company
To improve what customers can do with the software
The best case is both, but it is not always the reality. Rough, I know, It took me years to understand.
Taking it further, I can say there is another way of looking at it - your code will either
make more money for the company you work for
or make it cheaper to serve the same number of customers
For a long time, I was writing Software to create a perfect Software. Until a company that had a terrible codebase and systems got sold for over half a billion £. I realised then the code doesn’t matter. Business does. The Business is the Impact.
How to learn
Learn how Venture Capital works and how it differs from privately owned companies. Long story short, VCs buy a part of the company in the hope the share value will go up and they can sell it for more. Privately owned companies want to grow their customer base and increase revenue through the best service they can provide.
Every time you work on a feature or see a change in the organisation, ask yourself or others - how does it increase the value for our customers or the overall value of the organisation? As you start collecting answers, you’ll understand better why certain decisions, seemingly bad from an Engineer's perspective, are good for the organisation as a whole.
Contrarian thinking
I’ve been naturally contrarian my whole life. I treated it as bad, as it’s hard to make friends when you disagree with everybody around you. What I’ve learned is it’s my most precious asset.
To be 10%, 5% or 1%, you must adopt a way of thinking most people don’t. You must do what most people don’t or do it better than most. You can’t have an average mindset and achieve great success.
Disagreeing doesn’t mean being untactful. It doesn’t mean to treat other people worse. It means knowing what advice to listen to and distinguishing the average gossip from the strategies that will get you to the top.
How to learn
First, look at the objective results of the person you look up to. Have they achieved what they claim? Could they replicate it in any other context? If they are ahead of you, you can learn from them. Conversely, if your friend in the marketing department gives you advice on system design, there is a good chance they are wrong.
Second, start noticing the average advice. What is commonly repeated gossip that everybody treats like a common truth? They are great on average and a good point of start. Ask what can be better and stay courageous in innovating better solutions.
Sales and marketing skills
You can sell and market already. Have you told your friends about the great movie or programming concept you discovered recently? Congratulations. It was a sales pitch.
Sales and marketing are a step up from communication skills. The next level is to structure your messages so others will agree. As for the point about your opinions, now you need to sell them.
When you look for a job, CV and LinkedIn are your advertisement, the Interview is a sales call. You are the product.
When you propose a solution to a problem to your team, the technical meeting is a sales call. The solution you have is the product.
How to learn it
Focus on asking first about what are the other person’s priorities and then highlighting how your solution will benefit them. Instead of showing your point of view show how others benefit from it.
Resilience
Being contrarian and holding to your opinions means you’ll fail a lot. When you start, your base of 10% beliefs and skills will be very low, and you will fail more times than you succeed.
But as you keep on going, you’ll fail less and less and eventually start getting more successes than failures. Then you’ll become an overnight success.
You need to be resilient in the face of failure to get through the challenging phase. A great mindset to adopt is that you either win or learn so no matter what you do you move forward.
How to learn it
Plan to fail. Expect to fail. Fail a lot and fast. Resilience means how fast you recover from a mistake and how many times you make the same one before you start making better decisions.
Radical accountability
Responsibility is the gateway to change. A long time ago, I blamed others for my situation. I held my circumstances responsible for my failures. The circumstances controlled my life.
The significant change happened when I stopped blaming others and took back all the control and accountability for who and where I am.
The same happens in any organisation. It’s the manager’s fault or the company’s culture. When you start saying you’re accountable for the success, you gain the power to change for the better.
How to learn
Hold yourself responsible for EVERYTHING. Reframe any situation in a way you control it. If you have a colleague you find hard to work with - how can you communicate better with them? If you don’t like the company’s culture - how can you change it for your team or find a company where your needs are met?
Observe your thought patterns when you blame outside factors for your inability to deliver. Weather, inflation, government? Take back their power and ask yourself, “What can I do in this situation?”.
Growth mindset
Thinking about all the goals I didn’t achieve made me feel like a failure. At the same time, I was making significant progress towards them. I found the shift from thinking about results to process not only helped my mental health but also made me improve faster.
Most people want the results. Fast. You like me back in the day, feeling bad for myself for not having the life I wanted. They don’t see the compounding effect of getting better every day.
It’s also the mainstream BS taught about allocating time for your goals. When you start learning new skills, knowing how fast you get the results is impossible. There is also bias, saying that the time you plan for a goal is what it will take. Setting up time to result can slow you down.
How to learn it
Start measuring your progress. How much time do you learn? How many new things you’ve learned this week? How many new experiences have you had from your failures? Start collecting and comparing to how you did a week or month earlier.
Instead of measuring time to goal, measure progress in a constant amount of time.
Wrapping up
The 7 skills I presented are the most impactful ones that took me from a blue-collar worker to an Engineering Manager and beyond the 10%. The 10% is just a start. How far you aim, that far you can go.
The average skills are essential as well, but they are the foundation. You can’t build a great skyscraper without a stable base.
P.S.
Having a coach can 4x the speed of your growth. I can vouch for that, as I wouldn’t be here without the people who helped me along the way.
If you want to learn the 10% skills faster than everybody else, find a coach who can boost you.
My coaching program focuses on the 7 skills you’ve learned about today.
For the next week and only for the following 3 clients (I take only a few clients at any given time), my Career Boost package is available at a discounted price of £600 (paid in 2 instalments of £300) or £499 paid upfront.
Besides the coaching, all my clients gain ongoing support in their career via email and LinkedIn, upcoming community and discounts on all products released in the future.
Before we start working together, I want to ensure I can give you the help you need to guarantee I can deliver the desired results. Therefore, I book a free 20-minute no-strings-attached discovery call. In that time, we’ll find a solution to one of your current problems, and you can learn more about how coaching can benefit you in your career.
If you want to get your results faster and learn from someone who’s done that already, book your discovery call today.