A friend and I had a discussion about the basic skills that are often lacking in experienced programmers. How can a programmer work for ten or twenty years and never learn to write good code? So often they need close supervision to ensure they go down the right path, and they can never be trusted to take technical leadership on larger tasks. It seems they are just good enough to get by in their job, but they never become effective.
We thought about our experiences and came up with three fundamental skills that we find are most often missing. Note that these are not skills which take a considerable amount of talent or unique insight. Nor are they "trends" or "frameworks" to help you get a new job. They are basic fundamentals which are prerequisites to being a successful programmer.
Programmers cannot write good code unless they understand what they are typing. At the most basic level, this means they need to understand the rules of