Ask Slashdot: Communication Skills For Programmers?

An anonymous reader writes "As a new developer at a young-ish software company, I've been told my communication skills need some work. I'm not painfully introverted or socially inept, but I get lost in my work and only contact people if I need something from them or they ask me a question. Traditional advice isn't relevant to casual, less hierarchical companies — I don't have to hold my tongue when someone is wrong or worry about formalities. But I do need to connect with people professionally, since my team members and managers decide my perf and advancement. How do you keep colleagues abreast of your work without having exponentially many needless conversations?"

You have needless conversations.

[jerpyro]

I hate to say it but the retention rate for programmers is higher than everyone else. So, when you go to advertise what you've been working on (and yes, it's advertising) sometimes you'll have to re-hash the conversation four or five times. The trick is to re-hash the ideas and talk about things in a different way each time so that the topic doesn't get stale to the audience.

I wish (as do many programmers) that advancement was about nothing but pure ROI to the company (including future ROI) but it doesn't work that way. It's hard to measure, is labor intensive to figure out, and is a waste of time in a small company. So, failing that, you rely on marketing. How you get along with people, small talk, casual banter, idea roundtables at lunch breaks, those all contribute to your "brand image" and you need to take advantage of that image to paint a perception of intellectual value at your company. Make sure you're good enough to provide deliverables to back up your image. You also need to pick one or two things to be REALLY good at so that other people can ask you for help. Helping people helps you.

Find out from the source - the manager

[Stolpskott]

The manager is the one who has made this comment, so I would surmise that one of two scenarios is at work here:
1. The manager has either noticed for themselves, or they have received feedback about you, to the effect that you do not communicate effectively with others within the company.
2. The manager is looking for a reason to give you a less-than-excellent performance review (a couple of potential reasons for this, the most common one being that the less than perfect review impacts your bonus, thus saving money for the company; alternatively, this could simply be a manager who just does not give excellent reviews because they think it leads to complacent employees).

In both cases, the best thing to do is ask the manager for their advice. You are a young, (relatively) inexperienced person on the team, and from my perspective it is safe to assume that you are interested in improving yourself and doing the best job that you can - that means that if you could self-identify things you can do better, you would have done so and be doing them. So take the manager to one side and explain that you are looking for some specific input about what areas of communication could be improved. Usually in my experience, where it is not a matter of the manager finding fault to save on bonus payments, it is not about communicating more, but more effectively. If that is the case, the best advice I could give is to look up a public speaking organisation - Toastmasters (www.toastmasters.org) is one of the more common ones, and one that I have worked with for a few years. You can learn more about effective communication, and also about leadership as well, both of which will carry your career a lot further if you are a good programmer, than just being a good programmer.

Re:How to be a Star Engineer

[robot256]

This IEEE article is the only answer the poster needs. I read it all the way through, and it is spot on, matching my personal experience. I sometimes wondered what exactly I had done to garner such high praise from my colleagues and managers, but as it turns out I was doing all nine of their "Star Work Habits". Paraphrasing some of their findings with my experience:

Those "needless conversations" are where you can ask about other people's projects and experiences. Find out what their areas of expertise are so you can go to them when you need help, or can point others in direction--becoming a clearing-house for technical advice makes you conspicuously valuable and is a great way to gain exposure to all sorts of people and problems in your organization.

At the same time, you can also discover other opportunities. When I first joined as an intern, I quickly became part of the team by volunteering to help out on projects way above my pay grade because knew I had the skills to do them as well or better than the senior engineers. By delivering quality work on those assignments, my boss put me on the fast-track to more interesting projects and responsibilities.

More advanced forms of "communication" include knowing when to push back against your boss on requirements or schedule in order to benefit the organization in the long term, proactively stepping in to resolve conflicts among teammates, promoting others' good ideas when they are not being heard, and learning the ins and outs of the corporate culture so you can communicate effectively with other departments and managers.

It may seem like a waste of time, but you can learn a lot of valuable information by listening to the old-timers ramble on about this and that. More importantly, if you listen to their stores, they will be more willing to help you out when you need their advice.

So my immediate advice for the poster is: Get out there, chat with your coworkers at lunch or the water cooler, and don't worry too much about keeping track of how many dogs they have or where they went to vacation last year. Do ask them about technical topics or share what you are working on--it may be a more comfortable topic for them as well, and vastly more useful.