Iulia Sălăgean

We are not living in the Stone Age any more, we are social human beings and we should be also social engineers. It was long time ago when a project was a one-man show, so we have to learn to collaborate, we have to learn how to work in mixed-skills teams and how to share ideas and solutions in order to have a successful life as code writers. According to Tudor Girba1, as developers we spend about half of our working time reading code. Why reading code? Because the current code bases are growing every day, and with each task we have to implement,we will end up reading code more than actually writing it.

Financial Information eXchange protocol is a message layout used to exchange financial information. It was designed for real-time exchange of information related to securities transactions and markets. When it was initially developed, it was intended to automate a communication that was done via phone. The first ever communication via FIX was between Fidelity Investments and Salomon Brothers. One of the reasons for using machine-readable communication was to reduce the amount of errors caused by human factors.

When I began my career as a software engineer, I could not have imagined the important roles adaptability and soft skills would play in achieving successful outcomes for projects. In those early days, I believed that everything was black or white, that analytical and problem solving skills were my greatest assets, and that communication should always be direct and concise. Reality showed me a different picture. I joined Flow Traders in 2011 and I immediately found myself working with a wide variety of people, not just the machine in front of me. I had never considered that I might need to sell a solution to someone, or that I would need to explain the architecture of a big project to a non-technical person. These were new skills that I needed to learn. In this article I will share my experience of working at a company where diversity feels at home - the perfect place to develop communication skills and learn the value of our differences.