This has never been the case for those of us doing consulting, soft skills are a must have requirement when dealing with customers on regular basis.
Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
91–100 of 304 posts
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#92I 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.
Looks very robotic to me, never worked on a place where meetings and dealing with other humans wasn't part of the job.
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#93I'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,…
One just needs to survive one layoff round to learn that going above and beyond is useless, everyone gets shown the door regardless of the performance.
That is one reason why companies don't like seniors, we know their tricks.
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
Part of the soft skills that are useful for a developer is being able to frame your crucial questions in a way that makes their importance relevant to their world.
Perhaps soft skills are too squishy and/or broad of a term to be useful then. It seems like these discussions always go "maybe you, as the developer, just need to learn how to do soft skills properly?" in response to business types exhibiting an undesirable behavior. Sure, smooth talking and playing into someones personality might be more successful (albeit with a lot more hot air), but all of you are supposed to be working towards a goal. If someone gets hung up because you weren't smooth enough, I would think they're a bad faith actor who doesn't actually want to get something done.
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#95Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#96Earlier 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.
Looks very robotic to me, never worked on a place where meetings and dealing with other humans wasn't part of the job.
I’ve been on plenty of teams where meetings didn’t actually require any meaningful participation from most people.
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#97It won't help. LLMs are good at soft skills, too. There's a whole "AI girlfriend" industry, and it's quite successful.
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Part of the soft skills that are useful for a developer is being able to frame your crucial questions in a way that makes their importance relevant to their world.
Perhaps soft skills are too squishy and/or broad of a term to be useful then. It seems like these discussions always go "maybe you, as the developer, just need to learn how to do soft skills properly?" in response to business types exhibiting an undesirable behavior. Sure, smooth talking and playing into someones personality might be more successful (albeit with a lot more hot air), but all of you are supposed to be…
Soft skills are broad in scope, for sure.
But I’m not talking about “smooth talking” here; in response to the above example —- where engineering is asking questions that that the business things had not answered because they are presumably “unimportant” —- there is almost certainly a communication breakdown happening.
Likely, one of the following is happening:
* The questions are important to the business but engineering has failed to articulate why getting the answers are critical to the business. (Some engineers have a tendency to describe problems in the scope of how it affects their own job or task, but neglect the larger picture or fail to articulate any consequences)
* The questions actually aren’t important for the business to answer and the engineer fails to understand how their task supports the goals of the business
* The questions are important but they cannot be answered by the business. The engineer might need to gather more information before to generate actionable questions, or maybe the questions should be answered by engineering themselves.
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#99The 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 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.
This is just not true. Lack of soft skill never implied high intelligence, it was always and is just lack of soft skills. Some people without them are otherwise highly intelligent, others are just normal or even weaker then average.
> You far more often see moderately successful charlatans that are all talk than successful people with awful communication skills. Of course if you're able to walk the talk, that's when you can really go places.
I would argue that this is consequence of management that does NOT have soft skills. People write a lot about soft skills of engineers and simply assume management has them. They do not always, yes they then end up being bad managers ... and charlatans doing good is usually consequence of bad management without those actual people skills. Soft skills are not just about coming across nice, they are also about being able to be assertive, being able to recognize charlatans or toxic personalities and being able to deal with them (which is not the same as enabling them).
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#100I 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 HOSTS of dogshit devs that operated that way, trust me. Half the job of a PM has been to work with these types of people.