What does it mean to be a professional developer?
We want to summarize it like this:
- Clarity and understanding: A good developer understands purpose and target image - that is: why something should be built.
- Flexibility with specifications: A professional developer accepts that specifications may be limited and fills in the gaps by asking questions, chasing people, and testing theses with the client.
- Prioritization and balance: A professional developer understands that factors such as time and budget are just as important as code quality. They know when they need to lower the quality bar to meet an important time goal and if necessary create a technical debt that can be fixed later.
Finding professional developers is not always easy and often requires mentoring, as it can be interpreted as doing a poor job, when it's really about balancing different demands and expectations in a professional way. Do you agree?