[gaoshan]

"One of the tough pills I and probably many other developers have had to swallow when maturing is that "non-programming skills" from schools are useful and very valuable, actually."

It is interesting in how challenging it can be to convince some younger developers of this. Some of the stronger and more technically proficient developers (that are young-ish... mid 30's and down, let's say) have a level of contempt for those skills that is surprising and not trivial to coach them on. They seem to suffer from "smartest person in the room" syndrome and mistakenly believe those smarts apply to everything they deal with rather than the just the technical areas that they excel in.