Single most important thing to improve your programming career

The single most important thing you must do to improve your programming career is improve your ability to communicate. To program, you must elicit ideas from other people and share your ideas with them. Sharing ideas comes in many forms: explaining how you did something. Suggesting a new practice for the team. Demonstrating how something works. Convincing everyone to switch programming languages. Persuading a brilliant engineer to join your team. Persuading your manager to get out of the way and let you do your thing Advancing your career is entirely about communicating. Getting a job. Turning down a job. Asking for a promotion. Turning down a promotion. Getting onto a good team. Politely extricating yourself from a good team. Persuading a brilliant engineer to co-found a company. Helping a brilliant engineer understand why co-founding a company isn’t the right thing to do. Asking for funding. Turning down funding. Getting clients. Turning down clients.