Comment by strenholme
6 years ago
In my experience, there are a lot of developers who get really uncomfortable once they start having more developers working on their code. There’s a lot of effort which has to be done documenting the code: Either by explaining how the code runs to other engineers on the team, or by having documentation showing how the code is arranged and runs, something a lot of engineers are not very good at doing.
It takes a lot of talent to do collaboration well, because it means having to let go of the code being “my code”, and it means having a lot of people skills, such as the ability to empathize with how someone not familiar with the code will see things, and how to write documentation about the code structure so that things can be in maintainable “boxes”.
I mean, that's fair, but growing past that is also part of learning to be an effective engineer. It's not always a comfortable process - it sure wasn't at first for me! - but that's often true of any kind of growth.
I think it's better described as a skill than as a talent, too. The former is learned, the latter innate, and as someone with absolutely none of the latter, I can attest that the former is attainable nonetheless.