You can hire the most brilliant coder on paper, but if they cannot explain a high-security risk to a non-technical director, they are effectively useless.
Working on large-scale GovTech platforms for over a decade has taught me that being a top-tier Drupal specialist today means being a translator first, and an engineer second.
Frameworks like Drupal 11 are incredibly mature. Writing a custom module or optimising a database query is standard engineering. But after 12+ years of architecting critical infrastructure for Czech ministries and EU institutions, I have realised that the real breakdown in enterprise projects rarely happens because of a bad line of code.
It happens because of a breakdown in human communication:
A developer knows the syntax but cannot align technical decisions with the client's actual business goals.
A team focuses so much on the screen that it loses touch with the stakeholders.
Open source grows when we bridge the gap between technology and people.
If we want to scale large platforms successfully, we need to value communication skills just as much as technical seniority.
To my fellow developers, tech leaders, and engineers: how much of your daily success depends on the code you write versus the conversations you have?