Skills most used at work

Question

As an AI developer, what skills do I use the most at work?

Answer

The following list is ordered according to the importance I give to those skills in my success at work.

• Analysis/understanding the problems: There's no point in doing work if you don't know why you're doing it. Understanding why you are solving a specific problem will give you insights on the best way to solve the problem itself using the right approach.
• Programming: I'm a software developer, so I spend most of my time (or hope I am) on writing code. That also includes reading code written by others.
• Prioritization: I need to decide what tasks are more important than other tasks and organize the list of tasks from most to least important. At my current job, it's everyone's responsibility to decide what is important to build.
• Time management: I have a variety of responsibilities so I need to juggle between them and the time I allocate to them. I also need to accomplish certain tasks according to deadlines, so it is important to properly manage my time, what gets done and when it gets done.
• Design/code organization: Programming is more than science. You also need to think about how the different parts of the code interact with each other and how to organize the code so that it is easy for others to understand the code and to participate in its development.
• Negotiation: Working in an organization means negotiating with others to make your ideas heard, accepted and developed. Not everyone will agree with your ideas, so you need to spend time and effort to convince others that your idea is the best.
• Scheduling: While time management is about making sure that you're spending your time on a task at the right moment, scheduling is about organizing your use of time with others in the company. It is about scheduling meetings and or events.
• Delegation: Being able to offload work to others is important. It is however a difficult skill because you need to be able to properly communicate with others what needs to be done and the expectations that you have (or that others have) regarding the completion of the task.
• Debugging: I love playing detective when there are issues in the code I maintain. I've acquired over the years a good ability to understand a system and to quickly pinpoint the cause of a bug or low performing system.
• Communication: Work is largely exchanging information and aligning with your coworkers. The most important skill of communication is listening because you want to understand first before saying anything.