I suppose I'm a very laid back sort of person. I know I'm a very laid back sort of person. That's a combination of a lot of attitudes and rules that I try to live by, that in total justify my being a rather passive-aggressive person. I'm the kind of person who'll have a heart attack from all the stress of keeping things inside all the time.

I've always been rather quiet. Except for my friends. And even then, it takes me months to open up to new people. But I've always been shy and introverted so for the most part I didn't really socially with most of my peers. That's the kind of thing that still dogs me today.

Communication skills -- people skills -- are very important, as I have discovered living in the real world. Not only do people make snap judgements based on how you look and talk, how a document you wrote reads, what other people think of you, but good communication reduces a lot of friction in life.

Many a time have I found that miscommunication has caused delays as we resynch to make sure everyone is on the same page. We have so many meetings to discuss things, and although we do clear up several things we also don't clear up several things that cause more troubles in the next meeting.

Proper documentation skills is also something else that I and the rest of my coworkers lack. College doesn't stress writing skills to much for the technical majors. Developers who can write well, and I mean being able to write a technical document that a non-technical person could understand, are the exception rather than the rule.

To be sure, part of the problem is the high number of foreign- born developers my company hires. We definitely have our share of H1B Visa employees. And they have good english skills and vocabulary, but not necessarily good writing skills.

I'm in charge of writing our Architecture and Schema documents. Not developing them, for the whole team works together to develop our architecture. But I write it up at the end and my documents are what is sent to outside groups and our VP and such. And it's frustrating that as I write the next revision due the next day that there are gaps and unresolved issues that I have to kind of hand-wave and mark for discussion in our next meeting.

There's actually a lot of stuff that I decide on as I write up things. That's not something that I should be doing, as no matter how right I think I am, I'm not that great a developer and should seek the other's input.

One thing I find difficult is that other groups don't keep good documentation on-line and available. It makes it quite hard for us to write our product if we're not too sure exactly what other products will provide. We have the same problems (heck, we don't even have a website). So we spend a lot of time trying to track down the other teams and e-mailing back and forth and trying to clarify all these little points.