Software Engineer Like Qualities
The Indian armed forces look for 15 qualities, dubbed the Officer Like Qualities (OLQs), in its potential Officer recruits. They are:
Based on the OLQs, I would like to coin a new set of qualities — Software Engineer Like Qualities (SELQs). It is comprised of the qualities that I have repeatedly bumped into while perusing the job descriptions of Software/Fullstack/Backend Engineers for startups (mainly in the EU).
The following are the Software Engineer Like Qualities along with the job description points hinting at them:
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
- You like to continuously challenge yourself by finding new and better ways to solve complex problems
- Be a self-starter and possess a strong sense of self-motivation.
- High personal productivity and excellent time management.
- You don't take "no" or "that'll never work" for an answer.
- You communicate effectively (listening, presenting, and questioning).
- You give and receive open, direct, and timely feedback.
- You have strong organizational, written, and communication skills.
- You are clear, proactive, straightforward, and a good listener.
- You aren't afraid to ask for clarification.
- You can quickly adapt to changing priorities.
- You can work in a fast-paced environment and meet changing deadlines/priorities in simultaneous projects.
- You can remain calm under pressure in a frequently changing environment.
- You are able to work with diverse team members with different levels of experience.
- You believe that you can achieve more on a team.
- You lead with humility and empathy, respecting and learning from the perspectives of others.
- You are always looking for ways that you can help others.
- Ability to quickly learn new technologies.
- You don’t believe in one-size-fits-all solutions.
- You are constantly evolving with the technology trends, and willing to embrace change. You don’t mind learning new technologies if it means getting you there sooner.
- Ideally, you have published your own app, contributed to an open-source project, spoke at a conference, and/or published blog posts :)
What German startups look for
I wanted to know what tech startups in Germany were looking for in their software engineering roles (0-3 yrs experience). To do so, I decided to refer to the LinkedIn Top German Startups lists [1] from 2019-2021. After copying the 'requirements' section of about 100 Software/Backend/Full-stack Engineer job listings from the above startups, I had a text file of 5565 words ready.
The following was the output after running a short Python script for cleaning out English stop-words along with non-skill terms and printing the 25 most frequent skill terms in the text file:
- java
- aws
- python
- spring
- javascript
- docker
- sql
- kubernetes
- react
- apis
- nosql
- kafka
- typescript
- go
- kotlin
- node
- mongodb
- api
- restful
- postgresql
- gcp
- nodejs
- mysql
- ruby
- boot
Word cloud for the 50 most frequent skill terms:
[1]
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/linkedin-top-startups-2019-diesen-25-jungen-jetzt-arbeiten-sara-weber/
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/linkedin-top-startups-2020-diese-zehn-deutschen-starten-sara-weber/
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/linkedin-top-startups-2021-zehn-junge-top-unternehmen-/