What specific skill has had the biggest impact in your career?

Question

I'm curious what specific skill has had the biggest impact in you, career wise. Ideally, answers will focus on __specific__ things that can/were learned in relatively short periods of time.In my case, I would probably say command line programming in awk. It's something you can master in an afternoon or two and that will save you countless hours for decades to come.

huehehue · Accepted Answer

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.

AwesomeFaic · Answer

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)