What are the most beneficial programming skills?

Being able to learn and have the attitude of being able to learn something despite you not liking it much. That is a very important skill. Frankly, this is probably why I am still working in the industry as I really like to learn new things.

But I think the biggest skill is not being able to give up.

I have gotten so many projects to do which I thought were way over my head but I did them. It feels completely amazing. Having a bug or your code not working, getting a foreign key block from your database despite all your data being correct(-ish). Not just throwing things away and rage quit.

Now, I am not the puzzle kind of guy but I like challenges. At one place I worked, a co-worker kept bringing in all sorts of puzzles where you are supposed to open a box, a lock, get things pulled apart.

Many many more like this. I wasn’t the first one to try. But one fun thing, I usually had no problems with the harder puzzles and struggled with the easier ones. They come with a rating system. Not really struggled but I used more time on the simple ones than the much harder ones. But I basically would not give up. That seemed to be the same with my coworker, just not giving up.

You will need some mental capability to sit in front of a computer and solve a problem, even debugging deep down. The worst problems I have had took days to fix and only happened once in a while, not always. Those are very hard to fix.

This capability is also needed when you are learning new things, not to quit but go ahead and learn things despite looking like a beginner for a while.