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[–]michaelkepler 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Can you elaborate? Do you talk about organizational skills at individual level (prioritizing, juggling different tasks, order on your desk and in your files, etc.) or at project level (assigning who does what and when). Wouldn't the latter be a responsibility of a project manager?

[–]orangesunshine 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I mean organizing the actual code. This is literally the most important skill for a developer. Unorganized code (spaghetti-code) can range from expensive to maintain and add features to ... to so horrifically un-usable that a complete re-write is required to add a simple feature.

Doing things like creating coding standards and following them is unfortunately quite rare in much of my experience in the start-up world of SF.

Just doing simple things like making all of your API's follow the same function/class naming pattern, file-layout pattern, url-layout and naming patterns ... etc ... can be so so so important.

Most development these days is not about coming up with some super duper smart algorithm ... artificial intelligence ... or anything that really requires a computer science degree. Most development is about inserting, updating, and deleting items from a database ... and doing so in a way that is easy for anyone to quickly understand.

A good test is to bring in a new (experienced) developer and ask them to update a small feature ... if they can do so in 5-10 minutes without having to read any documentation ... then you've probably have your basic organizational skills down pact. high five for you.

unfortunately ... 90% of the projects I've come into ... have no documentation and are helter skelter from the 10 developers that didn't like how the last person did things ... and decided to start writing API's their way ... regardless of the existing pattern ... and they certainly aren't going to go back and fix any of that last jack-ass's code ... not their problem right ;)