Hire by Technology
SERVICES
Contents
Share this article
Key Takeaways
Technical skills are often listed in a resume and can be tested systematically. Soft skills are usually what decide whether that developer, engineer, or programmer is still someone you want on the team six months later.
If you are hiring a developer, knowing what you need to look out for, which of these skills actually shows up in an interview, and which ones you can only really see after someone's been working with your team for a few weeks, is essential to helping you make the right hiring decision.
Drawing on our IT staff augmentation and nearshore outsourcing experience, let’s go over the 10 soft skills every software engineer should have to ensure they are a good long-term fit for your company.
If you want skilled developers, already assessed and placed in as little as 3-5 days, view capabilities.
Communication matters in nearly every profession, but it carries specific weight for a software engineer, since the role often involves long stretches of solo, heads-down work punctuated by moments where everyone needs to be on the same page about deadlines, requirements, and what actually shipped.
This importance only compounds when you are in a heavily regulated industry like fintech.
It's hard to judge a communicator from a technical interview alone.
Instead, most of the signal shows up in the initial conversation.
When you assess them, consider whether the candidate explains their past work clearly, without over-explaining or assuming you already know the context. Do they ask a clarifying question before answering, or guess? A developer who listens well in an interview usually listens well in a standup too.
Even in a role built around machines, basic empathy affects how well an engineer works with the humans around them.
Since a variety of skillsets are required, enterprise teams especially can be made up of a variety of niche skillsets that all need to work together, such as payment integration engineers and regulatory specialists.
The soft skills show up in small, cumulative ways, like noticing when a teammate is stuck and offering help without being asked, or pushing back on someone's idea in a way that doesn't make them defensive about it.
Empathy also extends to non-engineers.
A developer who can see a feature the way a business analyst, a QA engineer, or an end user experiences it tends to build the right thing the first time, which is beneficial when requirements shift mid-project, like they often do in an Agile environment.
We find this is easier to check through references than through an interview. Ask a past manager how the candidate handled a disagreement with a teammate.
A developer with healthy self-awareness is confident about what they know well and genuinely comfortable admitting what they don't.
Engineers who are secure enough to name their own gaps tend to grow faster professionally, since they're not spending energy defending a position they know is weak. They are also less likely to create regulatory vulnerabilities because they are too arrogant to assume they understand what is needed.
The interview tells you how someone talks about a past mistake.
Confident, specific answers ("I underestimated how long the migration would take, and here's what I'd do differently") are the best signal.
Frustration is a normal part of software development. A sly bug that quietly causes routine underperformance somewhere in production will test anyone's patience eventually, and how an engineer responds in that moment matters more than whether they get frustrated at all.
People generally make better decisions from a neutral state than an agitated one.
Look for developers who address a problem and move past it.
Software teams that can't accept new ideas tend to get stuck. We have seen many examples of this.
Waterfall development was the default a decade or two ago, and the shift to Agile only happened because teams were willing to abandon a familiar process for a better one.
You want an engineer willing to take a chance on an unfamiliar approach if it's actually better. This is easier to spot in how someone talks about a past technology change than in how they answer a hypothetical.
Of everything on this list, this one is the one we’ve seen to have the largest effect on how a developer actually handles hard problems, and how far outside a narrow technical box they're willing to think.
An algorithm, in the strict sense, is a defined procedure for solving a problem. The better engineers apply that same structured thinking to problems that have nothing to do with code, such as staffing gaps, unclear ownership, or a stakeholder who wants two incompatible things at once.
This is also one of the few skills on this list that a real technical interview or a paired coding session genuinely does test.
Look out for how a candidate reacts when their first approach doesn't work. Do they adjust, or do they force it?
Software engineers answer to stakeholders on both ends of a project.
They communicate with the project managers and business leads on one side, the end client or product on the other.
Delivering something usable, on a schedule that isn't purely theirs to set, requires managing time in a way that holds up under pressure.
The most useful thing to check here is whether their past estimates were accurate. Ask what they committed to on their last few projects, and whether they hit it.
As we have already mentioned, software development is a team sport, even for a developer who spends most of the day alone in an editor, since that code eventually has to integrate with what a designer, a project manager, or another engineer built.
Collaboration draws on most of the other skills on this list at once: communication, time management, and empathy, working together rather than as separate boxes to check.
Watch specifically for how a candidate talks about a disagreement with a past teammate. The engineers worth hiring usually describe the resolution.
Mistakes are inevitable in software development. What separates a strong engineer is owning them cleanly enough that the rest of the team can learn from the mistake instead of just watching someone deflect it.
This is one of the more reliably checkable items on this list, since it shows up directly in how someone narrates their own history.
A candidate who can describe a real failure, what caused it, and what changed afterward is showing you exactly the trait you're trying to hire for.
Adaptability and open-mindedness go hand-in-hand.
New tools and frameworks show up in this industry constantly, and an engineer's willingness to actually learn them tends to separate developers who stay technically current from ones who quietly stop growing a few years into their career.
This matters more for remote and nearshore engineers specifically than it might seem.
A developer joining an existing team's tools, ceremonies, and codebase from outside needs to adapt to someone else's established way of working.
Every skill above still matters when an engineer sits down the hall. But communication and adaptability specifically carry more weight for a remote or nearshore hire, because there's no hallway conversation to quietly resolve a misunderstanding before it becomes a real problem.
A miscommunication that would get cleared up over coffee in an office can sit unresolved for a full day when the fix depends on a Slack thread and a time zone gap.
This is also where a vetted staffing partner earns its keep.
Trio's engineers are screened for exactly these traits before you ever see a profile, not just for the technical stack, which is a large part of why the placements hold up past the first few months rather than just the first interview.
Expertise
Subscribe to our newsletter
Related
Content
Continue Reading
