What Makes a Developer Valuable in 2025?

 

What Makes a Developer Valuable in 2025?

The RPG Blend – Real Code, Real Coffee, No Nonsense

Today’s Coffee: Green Mountain Horizon Blend
This coffee embodies the bold and boundless spirit of the American West. A dark roast as smooth as it is strong, alive with earthy, smoky flavors. It's the kind of cup you sip while building something that lasts—and this conversation is about just that: lasting value.

What Makes a Developer Valuable in 2025?

We’re no longer in a world where tech professionals are defined just by how well they write code.

Value today is measured by versatility, mindset, and the ability to work across boundaries—business, technical, and human.

Whether you’re knee-deep in RPG and DB2 on IBM i or running CI/CD pipelines with Node and Kubernetes, these are the characteristics that set valuable developers apart in 2025:

1. Adaptability Over Tool Obsession

In 2025, technology stacks evolve fast—but valuable developers don’t cling to comfort zones. Instead, they thrive in change.

They:

  • Shift between technologies easily: RPG today, Python tomorrow, maybe some bash scripting or SQL tuning in between.
  • Understand the patterns behind the tools. They’ve seen enough to know that frameworks are temporary, but clean design is forever.
  • Handle “We’ve never done this before” with curiosity, not panic.

Take the RPG developer who adopts VS Code, builds APIs, or writes web front-ends using open-source tooling. Or the JavaScript dev who jumps into ILE concepts to debug something mission-critical.

These folks are priceless—not because they know everything, but because they’re not afraid of anything.

The most valuable developers aren’t defined by what they know—they’re defined by how fast they can learn.

2. Business Context = Developer Superpower

Want to level up instantly? Understand the why behind the work.

Developers who know:

  • Who the end user is
  • What the business impact of downtime is
  • Why this feature matters to a revenue goal or compliance need

...are the ones leaders trust. They code with intention, not just direction. They prioritize the right bugs. They make tradeoffs with context. They know when 80% is good enough and when 100% matters.

A developer who says, “This change helps billing run faster during month-end close” is 10x more valuable than one who just closes tickets.

Your code lives in production—but your thinking lives in the boardroom.

3. Exceptional Communication Skills

Great developers are great communicators.

They:

  • Write tickets clearly and concisely.
  • Leave helpful comments (not just // fix later).
  • Present technical ideas to product owners or business analysts without jargon.
  • Give and receive feedback during code reviews like pros.

This isn’t soft skill fluff—it’s operational necessity. Teams work better when devs speak clearly, manage expectations, and collaborate without drama.

You don’t need to be a public speaker. But you do need to:

  • Speak up during sprint planning.
  • Ask the right questions during a design discussion.
  • Explain why you made a tradeoff without sounding defensive.

If no one can understand your code, your work ends at the keyboard.

4. Relentless Debugging and Systems Thinking

Bugs don’t live in isolation—and neither do the best devs.

In 2025, valuable devs are diagnostic thinkers. They:

  • Investigate logs and trace errors across services.
  • Understand queues, jobs, memory leaks, and locked records.
  • Read legacy code and know what not to touch.
  • Know when to fix and when to re-architect.

They don't just say "It works on my machine." They say:

  • “I see why this happens in production.”
  • “Here’s how to monitor it better next time.”
  • “This might be a data issue, not a code problem.”

They love tools like WRKACTJOB, DSPJOBLOG, AWR reports, top, git blame, or tracing tools—not because they’re flashy, but because they give answers.

Anyone can push code. Real developers trace root causes and prevent future outages.

5. They Help Teams Win

The best developers are multipliers, not heroes.

They:

  • Mentor the junior dev who’s struggling with git.
  • Share snippets, scripts, or SQLs that save others hours.
  • Take pride in writing documentation that doesn’t suck.
  • Celebrate team wins. Stay late for others’ deployments.

They’re the quiet force behind solid sprints and strong morale.

In retrospectives, their names come up again and again:

“I couldn’t have done it without them.”

They don’t compete with teammates—they build them up.

You don’t need a title to lead. You just need to care.

6. They Respect the Past and Lead into the Future

Legacy code. The phrase makes some engineers run for the hills. But valuable developers? They embrace it.

They know:

  • Legacy systems (like IBM i) often run the core of the business.
  • “Old” doesn't mean bad—just battle-tested.
  • Refactoring is an art—and so is knowing when not to.

Many RPG developers have:

  • Worked 72-hour weekends during Y2K or system upgrades.
  • Maintained code with no comments and made it better.
  • Designed normalized relational databases from scratch—on paper.

They don’t fear modern tools either. Many are already:

  • Using Git and VS Code.
  • Writing service programs and APIs.
  • Understanding how to containerize workloads or use CI/CD.

The best developers connect eras. They modernize with humility and precision—not arrogance.

It’s not legacy vs modern. It’s wisdom plus innovation.

Final Sips

In this edition of The RPG Blend, we explored the real markers of value in modern software development—not flashy frameworks or years in one stack, but adaptable, thoughtful, team-first behavior.

The most valuable developers in 2025:

  • Learn quickly, deliver confidently.
  • Understand how their work affects people.
  • Communicate like professionals.
  • Debug with grit and grace.
  • Make the team better—not just the codebase.
  • Honor the systems that came before while leading the way forward.

You can be one of them—one cup of coffee, one skill, and one conversation at a time.

So tell me—what do you think makes a developer truly valuable in 2025?
Drop your thoughts in the comments and let’s sharpen each other.

— George VanEaton
The RPG Blend – Real Code, Real Coffee, No Nonsense

 

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