Which non-technical skills (like negotiation, storytelling, or leadership) have had the biggest impact on your engineering career, and how did you develop them?

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I think something that has helped me was having the ability to write reasonably well. If you can communicate what you're doing it can make a big difference. Not being able to write clearly is a huge disadvantage, and you can see that in practice at times. The way I developed it was just by always reading and writing, and just trying to be conscious of what constitutes good writing. You don't have to write like a John McPhee to be successful, but if you make the effort to state things clearly it's consistently helpful.

I think that soft skills like building relationships, networking, managing and working with people-- those things are often weak points for a lot of engineers in my experience, so I've put a lot of emphasis on that in my career and it's definitely led to a lot of opportunities for me

Critical thinking and persuasion. Often, I have all the ideas of what I should have said in a meeting or conversation after the fact. I’ve noticed all the effective leaders in my company be able to clearly articulate their thoughts and objections in the moment. That’s something I’m working on.

Storytelling for sure

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