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Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply

wsj.com

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Re: Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply

#61

Post by [deleted] »

totalcrepe wrote: post #4
Havoc wrote: post #2

Strange - I usually associate "soft skills" more with leadership, people skills etc. And yeah they are in short supply because you can't teach them directly. The employees sorta need to pick them up from experience.

> And yeah they are in short supply because you can't teach them directly. If you can think critically are you going to get past the HR filters and convince them you are the recruit willing to take a deal that will descend into just a little worse than unemployment? (So your empty shell of a life after they spit you out is devoid of any unused benefits.) If you want to openly think critically in corporate employment,…

[deleted]

Re: Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply

#62

Post by Glyptodon »

Retric wrote: post #20
guitarbill wrote: post #7

Thank god the Wall Street Journal is encouraging critical thinking, and more importantly fostering the discussion by putting articles like this out for everybody to read /s On a more serious note, I don't believe this is true. In every place I've been, school, university, corporate jobs, the "critical thinkers" always got marginalised. This was the case even if they were truly nice people who cared - i.e. not abrasiv…

Don't confuse critical thinking with disruptive behavior. I often think the current approach is dumb, but I also accept I don't know everything. So, I generally just toss an idea out there, give it 15-30 seconds of support and move on. People that dig in even if they are correct and I agree with them are much harder to work with. Further, doing something even if it's a poor solution is often better than continuing to…

I agree with you, but it often leads to people with a clue getting repeatedly ignored by those without a clue. Which then leads to people feeling ignored/undervalued, particularly after the things they're ignored about go awry.

Re: Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply

#63

Post by cerrelio »

Retric wrote: post #52
zigzigzag wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disruptive behaviour is caused by frustration, and frustration in school is often caused by boredom (it's not like there are many other sources compared to the workplace). The problem with workplace politics is that there are usually two kinds of critical thinking: thinking that boils down to "we are doing OK, but we could do better if we did X" which is the type of critical thinking everyone loves, and then there's…

The second type is generally better dealt with indirectly so it becomes the first type. Daily stand up taking 1 hour every day. If you say it's a waste of time let's cancel it then people look bad. If you say, we are wasting time let's get faster then management is rarely going to complain. Do we really need 30 people in this meeting? What if we had someone send out the meeting notes? etc. Granted, this assumes peopl…

I dislike that passive-aggressive dynamic of converting the second type of thinking/feedback to the first. And that dynamic generally has a name: "politics". I've been on teams where I had to use rhetoric to convince a (non-technical) manager that following standard design practices like low coupling/high cohesion, etc. results in more robust software.

What's sad about that whole political dynamic is that it wears people down to the point they just don't care anymore. They're tired of people (often management) who can't make a decision due to political pressures ("I don't want to be the manager who has any project 'fail.'"). This often leads to decision makers succumbing to the sunk cost fallacy. But as long as there are status reports and it looks like work is getting done, then the process continues.

Re: Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply

#64

Post by rzzzt »

xpac wrote: post #41
MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #33

I think it is great that this question is asked by the wsj. Unfortunately the article is behind a paywall. Can someone with access please summarize the article?

Google the headline, click link from Google results, see paywall disappear. At least worked for me ;)

The small link titled "web" under the header does this for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645

Re: Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply

#65

Post by Glyptodon »

JoshTko wrote: post #59

I work for a fortune 100 and critical thinking is highly valued on my team. One thing that I've observed is that expressing critical thinking without communication skill comes across as being argumentative. If you find yourself frequently arguing a point but no one is convinced, assuming you are actually correct on the issue, then you probably just have weak communication skills.

Another thing I've noticed is that no matter how compelling the argument it's also near impossible to get people to take action to change things that are deeply entrenched even if they agree with you.

Re: Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply

#66

Post by whybroke »

If we're relying on all critical thinking skills to come as an unstated side effect of teaching math and elementary science that is sometimes taught alongside creationism then the results are obviously going to be watery.

If on the other hand students were taught just a few formal fallacies and led to analyze just a few arguments and just touched on formal logic while in high school, the nation would be transformed (but I imagine the flyover states would yell bloody murder)

Re: Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply

#67

Post by KirinDave »

Glyptodon wrote: post #65
JoshTko wrote: post #59

I work for a fortune 100 and critical thinking is highly valued on my team. One thing that I've observed is that expressing critical thinking without communication skill comes across as being argumentative. If you find yourself frequently arguing a point but no one is convinced, assuming you are actually correct on the issue, then you probably just have weak communication skills.

Another thing I've noticed is that no matter how compelling the argument it's also near impossible to get people to take action to change things that are deeply entrenched even if they agree with you.

I have seen this too. I have a theory about it.

Most organizations only recognize negative intercessions as praiseworthy, and categorize positive intercession as "business as usual" to be expected, even if sometimes the positive intercession is much harder.

"No!" moments are much valued in corporate culture these days.

People think this promotes the propagation of critical thinking across an organization. Perhaps ironically, the opposite is true. By tuning everyone to say, "No!" and rewarding them as such, it actually limits the impact of the actual important "No!" moments because everyone is competing for these accolades.

Most corporate culture does not reward people for following orders or improving upon someone else's idea. It's a legacy of the strict hierarchy all our organizations descend from (or a consequence of the apathy that more modern "matrixed" organizations breeds in its mid-grade baseline employees, who are taught not to overly invest in a given project).

Re: Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply

#68

Post by KirinDave »

Havoc wrote: post #2

Strange - I usually associate "soft skills" more with leadership, people skills etc. And yeah they are in short supply because you can't teach them directly. The employees sorta need to pick them up from experience.

> And yeah they are in short supply because you can't teach them directly.

Why can't you teach them directly?

Re: Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply

#69

Post by KirinDave »

programminggeek wrote: post #32

Employers don't want critical thinking, they want compliance and results. They might say they want more soft skills, but what they mean is they want someone to solve their problems and make them look good. Usually, that means a yes man. This kind of article is delusional naval gazing.

Surprising talk on a forum dedicated to startup capitalism. Culturally, this forum is aligned towards BEING the employers.

Re: Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply

#70

Post by cerrelio »

Glyptodon wrote: post #62
Retric wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't confuse critical thinking with disruptive behavior. I often think the current approach is dumb, but I also accept I don't know everything. So, I generally just toss an idea out there, give it 15-30 seconds of support and move on. People that dig in even if they are correct and I agree with them are much harder to work with. Further, doing something even if it's a poor solution is often better than continuing to…

I agree with you, but it often leads to people with a clue getting repeatedly ignored by those without a clue. Which then leads to people feeling ignored/undervalued, particularly after the things they're ignored about go awry.

This is what I deal with at my current position. There's a lead engineer who is working in a domain he has no knowledge of. The system being built, while having a somewhat sound, if not outdated, conceptual foundation, has not produced gainful/tangible results for almost three years. I told my manager that I strongly believed the system would never work, or be usable in production even if it "looked like" it worked. My input was ignored despite my demonstrated knowledge of the domain.

We had that conversation a year ago, and the system still doesn't do anything useful. The team morale is pretty low. Three levels of management are updated weekly on this project, but none of them seem to think anything is wrong. Because I don't have "lead" in front of my title, it seems my input isn't worth anything.

Anyway, it was nice to vent.

Also, I'm looking for another job. Any companies out there want a critical thinker who isn't afraid to deliver honest feedback? :)

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