The 5 soft skills that companies expect from a great Salesforce Developer

In Salesforce experts by Ben Duncombe1 Comment

The technical skills that make a great Salesforce Developer are well publicized, however we wanted to highlight the soft skills companies look for when hiring the best developers in the market. Talent Hub spoke to a number of companies in the Salesforce community to get their thoughts. The five soft skills most desired were:

Communication skills

It is really important for Salesforce Developers to be able to ask the right questions and interpret what a colleague or client really needs. Developers need to be able to ask and understand the why behind a request so you can properly understand the problem before beginning to code. Often Developers operate from the perspective of “just tell me what you want and I’ll build it” but this approach only works within companies who are mature enough to ask for all the right things, which is very rare.

Solutions Focussed

Its important for Salesforce Developers to really understand the business you work in and to ensure that the solutions you build either solve actual problems or enable the user to do their job better. A businesses objectives should drive what and how the solution is built, it shouldn’t be driven by the developers desire to build the most technically advanced solution possible.

Desire to learn

As we know Salesforce is constantly evolving and improving. Every quarterly release, Salesforce are looking to improve the system and improve the experience of the user. Developers should follow this same principal of rapid continuous improvement and be agile and adaptable to new technologies and ways of working.  Ensuring you are always striving to be the most valuable Developer you can be.

Willingness to help others

A good Salesforce Developer is worth their weight in gold. However it’s for this reason, whether you are in a leadership role or not, that you should want to help upskill those around you. Improving the team will not only enable you to improve the solution you are building, it will also enable you to spend more of your time on more challenging tasks and higher value activities,  making you a better Developer long term.

Analytical Mindset

Developers need to understand how their solution will be used and analyse all the business outcomes that are required. Developers should be passionate about long term code quality, which requires a test driven design approach.  It is important to understand the variety of potential business outcomes. Whilst this work is often performed by an Analyst, it’s often the case where not all scenarios and technical outcomes are defined, so it’s important a Developer has the analytical mindset to ask these questions.

Comments

  1. I can’t agree more with these points. Let me point out some ‘Hard’ Skills that every Salesforce developer must have.

    Salesforce developer must know how to ‘ZIP’ their code. In other words they must have the best optimized code which can run in a shared resource environment. They have to break the barriers of all the limitations Salesforce has enforced. That’s what make them special.

    Oh!!! wait there’s more. A Salesforce developer must be multi threaded all the time. I know how I hate developing multi threaded applications in traditional programming languages but in Salesforce you got no choice. Either you take it or leave it. Bulkify all the way!!!

    As far as I know Test Driven Development is quite hard to practice in Salesforce. Traditional TDD takes the Test First approach but its quite not feasible in Salesforce rather I would think ‘Business Driven Development’ is the best approach where the developer writes a test to cover a business functionality rather than trying to get the 75% code coverage. This is also one aspect where a Salesforce Developer stands out from the rest.

    Feel free to add comments on what I said.

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