Concrete Skills

In this week’s blog post, I will be discussing the “Concrete Skills” pattern discussed in chapter 2 of “Apprenticeship Patterns: Guidance for the Aspiring Software Craftsman” by Dave Hoover and Adewale Oshineye. This week, I chose this topic for my blog post because I think being able to supplement your knowledge with practical abilities will show to future development teams that you can be a helpful addition to the teams.

The first part of this section talks about how some of the first concrete skills that you will learn will mostly entail navigating HR and team assignments, and being able to assure your team mates that you won’t need constant supervision. “Acquire and maintain concrete skills. Even though one of the things that an apprentice brings to a team is an ability to learn quickly, the possession of discrete and demonstrable ability with specific tools and technologies increases the likelihood that you will be trusted to contribute indirectly until you start to gain stature. Some of the concrete skills you should acquire will be little more than mechanisms to get you past crude HR filters and managers who construct teams by playing buzzword bingo. Others will reassure your prospective team members that you can be put to good use and will not require “day care” (Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development, p. 88). Examples of concrete skills include writing build files in various popular languages, knowledge of various popular open source frameworks like Hibernate and Struts, basic web design, JavaScript, and the standard libraries in your language of choice.” Being able to show your fellow developers that you can stand on your own with development is a very important aspect of joining new development teams, but you must be able and willing to ask for help when you need it. The next section mentions something briefly that I think is incredible important, being able to quickly and effectively show an interviewer your concrete skills.

Being able to quickly and succinctly describe your concrete skills in a technical interview is essential. “The point is that you will often require hiring managers to take a leap of faith in choosing you. Concrete skills (which are ideally discrete enough that you can bring toy implementations to an interview) allow you to meet them halfway. The concrete skills you possess are your answer to the question: “If we hire you today, what can you do on Monday morning that will benefit us?” A deep understanding of Your First Language will help establish your credibility and should prove to be extremely useful to your team.”