Which skill a remote web developer should have?
Tags: webdev, remote, skills, javascript
Published: 2023-07-29 15:16:31

Two skills I got as a technical sales executive are today helping me become a remote professional developer: the patience to instruct others on new technology and the ability to communicate my ideas.
It is always nearly impossible to make a dream to be a real thing in your life. I was not as bold as the great Steve Jobs to risk everything by following his heart. I was the same when the first person suggested I take a software class to become a developer. I just smiled, greeted him politely, then continued walking. Five years later, I took my first “Machine Learning” class with only five students during Covid time. Over two years later, I joined Microverse to follow my dream of being a remote web developer. I have been trained importantly hard and soft skills under various real cases. It is like injecting them into our blood to re-born again to become professional remote web developers. Here, the world is truly flat through the internet. Daily I chat with international coders. We made friends and learned coding together through a diversity of views. I found that patience and communication are core elements for better connection to any success.
Patience should be crucial for a sales tech executive to win customers’ relationships or even a contract. Whenever I met a new customer, it was like a battle where the winner would be the person with true patience. Patience helped me listen to understand customers’ problems, point out the root of the problem, and win customers’ trust. Patience also helped keep my mind at the highest concentration to define the best-fit information to introduce within seven minutes to win customers’ attention and recognition. With that recognition, everything should become very easy later, and a contract should become very close. I could see the similarity that patience should be a core key for a remote web developer to be successful in online communications where cultural diversity could be high. Remote developers need to solve problems or meet clients to discuss issues remotely; all need to run through online meetings. Yeah, exactly, it is a meeting again. Now I have discovered that a remote professional developer should need patience as much as I did in the past to introduce his coding or tech solutions to audiences. He would need the patience to make a presentation carefully and clearly or operate the listening via the internet and media tools which could be unstable and indirect. For example, how unpleasant while you are presenting a code, a dog barking sounds suddenly happen around from some audience environment. I am lucky because my patience was trained heavily as a sales tech executive for over seven years. Certainly, patience is just a prerequisite; it confirms a solid stage to boost other skills to their best performance, like communication. 
Based on my experience of seven years working as a technical sales executive, communication could be any information others could get from you during a meeting. But inside this article, I only mention verbal communication, which could be a process from Greeting to Introduction to Discussion, then Ending. Each stage should be a single communication, for which I always set specific goals so that I should make some necessary preparation to achieve those goals. Verbal communication is the capability to arrange words in a perfect structure for customers to understand the idea you want to say. “Perfect” here is hard to explain properly, but it could be a short combination of commonly spoken words in a clear and gentle voice. My benchmark is “ONE sentence” is perfect, “TWO sentences” is excellent, “THREE sentences” is good. As a sales tech executive, I usually had to explain to customers technical problems. Therefore, I tried to study carefully to understand the products’ applications, then used common words to explain to customers. During my working time in a small startup company and full-time studying at Microverse, I could see that communication is also a core skill for any developer, from warming a meeting or building a quick relationship with your coding partners, of course, speaking clearly, slowly and politely to express your ideas, or rather saying “how to explain a tech problem for non-tech audiences to understand?”. 
I find myself more confident because I have got over seven years of practicing these two skills; patience and communication. However, I admit that soft skills are like instructions for multi-preparations we have to do to achieve better results because the environment and technology always change. The more we prepare, the closer we achieve. Therefore, applying them daily to prepare my readiness is always my priority.