You never really could. If you hear of a (very) succesful software engineer with horrid soft skills they’re a 1%er chance wise
I’ve been hearing this since the 90’s.
Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
41–50 of 304 posts
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#42The sort of people who have been able to neglect their soft skills are probably still going to be able to do so in the future. But those were always the extreme intelligence outliers, generational talent type figures. For most software engineers, neglect of soft skills have always been a career tarpit that leads nowhere you want to end up. Being able to navigate social settings and to communicate well is a force mult…
I think the author would say that the developer who is without soft skills won't merely be prevented from gaining desirable work. They'll be unable to keep a job, period.
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#43What about those professional software developers still refusing to use AI / LLMs? I know a couple and they're still churning out code completely 100% manually.
Heck, I even know a guy who refuses to use an IDE with Java and the indenting is a mess, but he gets there.
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#44I don't think it has ever been the case that you could neglect soft skills. You will hear this over and over, in every area of every business: people become successful by adjusting their behaviour to what works for the business. Sometimes this is called being a slick politician, sometimes it is called avoiding getting bogged down in politics. But it's never been the case that a dev could just focus on technical thing…
There are plenty of devs who do nothing beyond taking a Jira ticket scoped by others, implementing it, and then grabbing the next ticket. While they may not have been very successful, they did have a place.
You’re right but i have always preferred people who can do a little more. Nothing against the socially awkward and conflict avoidant nature in many of these friends, but people who push back and fight to communicate their views and passions often got our team better outcomes than someone who just turns up and does the work they’re asked to do.
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#45[dead]
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#46I thought this article was going to be about something else ...
It is really about prompting and writing specs - the "soft" (but really "hard") skill of giving detailed specs to an LLM so it does what you want.
I think the more important, truly soft, skill in the age of AI is going to be communicating with humans and demonstrating your value in communicating both vertically up and down and horizontally within your team. LLMs are becoming quite capable at the "autistic" skill of coding, but they are still horrible communicators, and don't communicate at all unless spoken to. This is where humans are currently, and maybe for a long time, irreplaceable - using our soft skills to interact with other humans and as always translate and refine fuzzy business requirements into the unforgiving language of the machine, whether that is carefully engineered LLM contexts, or machine code.
As far as communication goes, I have to say that Gemini 3.0, great as it is, is starting to grate on me with it's sycophantic style and failure to just respond as requested rather than to blabber on about "next steps" that it is constantly trying to second guess from it's history. You can tell it to focus and just answer the question, but that only lasts for one or two conversational turns.
One of Gemini's most annoying traits is to cheerfully and authoritatively give design advice, then when questioned admit (or rather tell, as if it were it's own insight) that this advice is catastrophically bad and will lead to a bad outcome, and without pause then tell you what you really should do, as if this is going to be any better.
"You're absolutely right! You've just realized the inevitable hard truth that all designers come to! If you do [what I just told you to do], program performance will be terrible! Here is how you avoid that ... (gives more advice pulled out of ass, without any analysis of consequences)"
It's getting old.
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#47I'm just going to sharpen up my hard skills so that I don't have to suck up on my soft skills. If that doesn't work out as I wish, well, since I already have a job, and I'm already 40+, and it looks like my company doesn't go away in a few years and we are so short-handed, I think I'm fine. Just to clarify that I'm not a jackass in real-life. In fact, I'm perfectly OK with all sorts of soft skills -- after all, my cu…
"I'm already 40+, and it looks like my company doesn't go away in a few years and we are so short-handed"
FANG employee for over a decade quit her job, opened a consultancy, and sold back what she was doing to former clients of her company(and their clients). She sold back what she was having to do to make up for this short-handedness, and the incompetence of many of her former colleagues.
She did it at 3-400 times the markup she was being paid while employed :) because they were time critical.
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are plenty of devs who do nothing beyond taking a Jira ticket scoped by others, implementing it, and then grabbing the next ticket. While they may not have been very successful, they did have a place.
You’re right but i have always preferred people who can do a little more. Nothing against the socially awkward and conflict avoidant nature in many of these friends, but people who push back and fight to communicate their views and passions often got our team better outcomes than someone who just turns up and does the work they’re asked to do.
As long as it is not opposite set of skills (talks a lot without knowledge to back it up so essentially using charisma to convince people to do the wrong thing most of the time) then yes, a lil bit of negotiation can save you a whole lot of work in the long run (XY problems being one example)
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#49[deleted]
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#50The sort of people who have been able to neglect their soft skills are probably still going to be able to do so in the future. But those were always the extreme intelligence outliers, generational talent type figures. For most software engineers, neglect of soft skills have always been a career tarpit that leads nowhere you want to end up. Being able to navigate social settings and to communicate well is a force mult…
I think the author would say that the developer who is without soft skills won't merely be prevented from gaining desirable work. They'll be unable to keep a job, period.
Seems a pretty sketchy assertion, but regardless whether these people burn out in career purgatory at a java 8 feature factory moving jira tickets around for all of eternity, or they move on to something else entirely, it's probably not what they had in mind.