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Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

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Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#51

Post by pgwhalen »

CrulesAll wrote: post #25
pgwhalen wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your original post that the need for hard skills will persist, but I see it in the other direction: software engineers are going to have to get better at thinking in larger abstractions, not deeper understanding of the stack. Those who can only solve problems locally and repeat the patterns they've seen before rather than create new patterns from building blocks are the ones who are going to struggle.

"software engineers are going to have to get better at thinking in larger abstractions" ........Math was first on my list. I don't know how else to say that.

Ah, I think “Math” as a single word on its means many different things to many different people, I didn’t interpret in quite the same way. But I see what you mean.

I’m not sure that my colleagues who I think of as “good at math” and “good at thinking in larger abstractions” are necessarily the same ones, but there’s definitely a lot of overlap.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#52

Post by markus_zhang »

CrulesAll wrote: post #47
markus_zhang wrote: post #33

I'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 t…

I’m not in FAANG and mine is just a small one which may not afford a lot, but yeah I totally agree it’s a good idea for a FAANG person.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#53

Post by CrulesAll »

codingdave wrote: post #38
CrulesAll wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"software engineers are going to have to get better at thinking in larger abstractions" ........Math was first on my list. I don't know how else to say that.

> I don't know how else to say that. Yep, exactly. The failure to realize that you mean different things when talking about "larger abstractions" is exactly the kind of miscommunication that software people will need to navigate better in the future.

If you need to have that explained to you, you are the problem.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#55

Post by MattGaiser »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #17

The 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…

The shift is from tarpit to unemployment. A Jira ticket processing dev still has use. Probably not for much longer.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#56

Post by mupuff1234 »

Counter point - If one person can now do the work of an entire team the level of communication skills required will actually be simplified.

So now instead of needing to manage multiple stakeholders and expectations of 10 different middle managers you'll probably just have a 1:1 with a single person.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#57

Post by ambicapter »

lolive wrote: post #19

Be careful, engineers, when interacting with soft skill experts not to join their reality distortion field where it’s all about coordination, alignment, bizness strategy, clever planning. Whereas the real stuffs are just implémentation details, quickly solved. In the end, they might convince you that 2+2=5.

The trouble isn't that they would convince me with their reality distortion (they don't), the issue is that they are satisfied with their "progress" while I'm still asking crucial questions (which they ignore, b/c they don't see the importance).

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#58

Post by benttoothpaste »

I've heard this "soft skills are the only skills that matter" thing throughout my entire career but these days this is indeed greatly amplified.

Our CEO started sharing screenshots of his xitter/linkedin feeds and most of them contain wisdoms like "Opus 4.5 is better than 90% of talent". There is also longer form business fan fiction. It usually follows this template: there is a hero - a humble manager/sales person, and a villain - a cocky, nerdy software developer. The villain claims that some task is impossible or takes months to complete. Then the humble hero (equipped with Opus 4.5) completes the task in 2 hours. The villain is then humiliated/fired and everyone lives happily ever after.

These posts definitely contribute to the declining morale among employees. Nobody goes "above and beyond" anymore - we just strictly doing the tickets and nothing more.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#59

Post by ambicapter »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #29
karczex wrote: post #28

So I opened this article to find out at the very beginning, that author put's a lot of money to AI providers... So probably also used it to write this article. So, according to the rule "text which is not worth of spending time on writing is also no worth of reading" I closed it.

I found out that the author of a blog post paid a maid to clean their house, and sends their laundry out. Therefore, the blog post was written by the maid, or one of the laundromat employees. So I closed it.

false equivalence

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#60

Post by ben_w »

CrulesAll wrote: post #25
pgwhalen wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your original post that the need for hard skills will persist, but I see it in the other direction: software engineers are going to have to get better at thinking in larger abstractions, not deeper understanding of the stack. Those who can only solve problems locally and repeat the patterns they've seen before rather than create new patterns from building blocks are the ones who are going to struggle.

"software engineers are going to have to get better at thinking in larger abstractions" ........Math was first on my list. I don't know how else to say that.

Computer science is indistinguishable from sufficiently advanced maths.

The AI can already do that part.

The abstraction that matters going forward, is understanding why the abstraction chosen by the AI does or doesn't match the one needed by the customer's "big picture".

The AI is a bit too self-congratulatory in that regard, even if it can sometimes spot its own mistakes.

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