Software developers thrive on hard skills and working within complex settings: the business logic is complex, the code needs to be understood, written, rewritten and debugged and these tasks take the most effort and time from developers.

Since these tasks are inherently technical, it's expected from developers, during interviews and in the first few weeks after getting through the door, to leverage their hard skills to prove themselves.

The first impressions that colleagues and managers will have of you will be mainly influenced by your technical skills and showcasing them should be your number one priority: you will display understanding of the codebase, you'll show that you can work over tickets and maybe have the opportunity to work with and understand infrastructure like pipelines and how it all links together to land your changes in production.

These first few weeks (or months) will be the time where your hard skills should be at the front and they should be your priority.

However, after a while, once you are more integrated into the process and with the team, you'll feel more at ease and tasks that before were hard and took a lot of effort become routine and you'll start feeling more comfortable.

After this threshold is reached, you can focus on leveling up within your company and in order to do that, your soft skills will be critical: interacting with your manager to define expectations for your growth, interacting with your direct colleagues to work on features or solve bugs and even interact with other teams to align on cross-cutting concerns.

The most important is to listen, to make your point reach across with other people, to be respectful and kind to others and these will be the skills that can take you further away in your career!