Important Skills for a Software Developer

Good post, but one major flaw in the comparison to carpentry:

"It doesn’t matter how many years experience in carpentry you have had or how well you can design furniture or cabinetry if every time you try to cut wood you struggle with making the cuts."

That's not even close to a legitimate comparison.

Cutting wood is a tactical, known activity. You learn how to do it, and you always apply the same known, proper technique.

Problem solving, by definition, means you don't have a stock answer to deal with. You are effectively inventing a solution and drawing on your experience. Worse, you invent a solution each time.

If he wanted to make a more accurate comparison, I would say declaring a variable or writing a for-loop is the equivalent of making a cut. Irrespective of the problem, those are done in standard ways and you just have to know how to do that.

For those wondering/questioning this line of thinking, compare the following:

--turning a bolt --putting an engine together

Those are two very different things. Or,

--cutting wood --constructing a house

Again, two very different things.

And I won't even factor in the idea of knowing how to do something "software developer related" in a few languages and/or a few frameworks.