
Ask HN: What specific skill has had the biggest impact in your career? - Anon84
I&#x27;m curious what specific skill has had the biggest impact in you, career wise. Ideally, answers will focus on __specific__ things that can&#x2F;were learned in relatively short periods of time.<p>In my case, I would probably say command line programming in awk. It&#x27;s something you can master in an afternoon or two and that will save you countless hours for decades to come.
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huehehue
I don't have a good answer for this, but I find the notion that you can learn
something in just a few hours that will profoundly impact your career
intriguing.

Interpersonal skills (re: AwesomeFaic), grokking bureaucracy, learning how to
learn are all career-long pursuits that define most careers (I would argue).

Tools like awk and sed are great but ultimately of marginal importance to the
average developer. In fact, I haven't even found the sum of _all_ similar
efficiencies to be worth dealing with.

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AwesomeFaic
As a developer, practicing articulation and interpersonal skills has advanced
my career more than any specific technology. I've gotten jobs because I was
the most memorable and pleasant to be around, more so than explicitly being
the strongest developer (although I obviously keep relevant skills up to date,
too)

