Written by Mike Coutermarsh

The difference between good and great is less about your technical prowess. And more about how you choose to apply your technical skills.

As developers, we place a lot of value in how good we are at writing code. But that’s only a small piece of the puzzle.

You can be writing code all day. But if your effort doesn’t create any value or solve any problems, then what’s the point?

Whether you solve a problem with a thousand lines of C or five lines of Ruby doesn’t really matter. 

Don’t get me wrong. Your programming skills are very important. But all that time you spend on becoming a good developer can be magnified if you also learn how to create business value with your skills.

Once I started spending time with Product, Marketing & Finance, my career began to take off as a developer.

A lot of developers keep to themselves or stay secluded in the “engineering cave”. This limits your perspective.

For the first couple years of my career, I spent all my time at my desk coding. If I had to talk to someone in the business, I primarily used email. I seldomly talked to them in person or even picked up the phone. I ate lunch at my desk, just so I could write more code.

I thought I was doing great work. But in reality I wasn’t. My performance reviews were average and other developers were getting put on the best projects. Even though I was writing a lot of “great” code, my work wasn’t creating much value for the business. I spent too much time on small technical details instead of the big picture.

My mentor at the time gave me some great advice.

“You have to get your butt out of your chair and go talk to your customers”

This is when things started to turn around for me.

You have to spend time with business people to learn the business. The better your understanding of the business, the more likely you’ll be to see opportunities where you can use your programming skills to create value.

Once I started to understand this. My career began to take off. I started getting assigned better projects and my performance reviews went from average to awesome.

Getting started was easy, and you can do it too.

• Go to all company events, get to know non-developers within your company.
• Try to eat lunch with different people. Grab coffee, get out of the office. Learn about their work.
• Spend time in common areas, does your company have a lounge? Game room? Kitchen? Hang out there and ask your co-workers what they are working on.
• Ask lots of questions. Just like developers have their own language & acronyms. So does the business. Learn what they mean and what’s important to the company.

Once you start building relationships and deeply understanding the business. You’ll notice that you start to think about your projects a bit differently.

Before I start a project, I now spend 30 minutes doing one key thing.

When you’re assigned a project, do you simply do exactly as your told? That’s what an average developer does.

A great developer understands the value that’s being created from it.

Learn the 80–20 rule and work with the Project Manager on how you can implement a solution to the problem with the least amount of code.

Remember, you’re aiming for the biggest impact, with the least effort.

Often, in technical work, a small detail can take up a lot of our time. But in the end, it might not make a large impact on the end result. Learn to look for these parts of the project and suggest they be cut out, or saved for “version 2”. By spending just a little time upfront, you are able to maximize your impact and minimize the time spent doing it.

So, what’s the best way to be a great programmer?

1. Get outside of the “engineering cave” and learn how business works.
2. 80–20 everything!
3. Leverage your technical skills to solve problems that provide huge value.

Learning this early on was HUGE for me. I hope you find it helpful too.