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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

#111

Post by luckylion »

lordnacho wrote: post #12

I 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…

It depends on what you want to achieve as a developer, I think. Having some soft skills makes a lot of things easier, but if you don't have the hard skills to back it up, you'll plateau unless you switch to management before you reach your limit.

At the same time, if you're very good at what you do, soft skills are a lot less important. Most of my peers would rather work with brilliant jerk than a friendly average person.

But most people are not brilliant, and then you can't afford to not have soft skills.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#112

Post by sph »

echelon wrote: post #32
shevy-java wrote: post #27

> Today, I use Claude Code for almost all non-trivial programming tasks and have spent $500+ on it just last December. Truthfully, I don't want to get advice from people who become addicted to AI, sorry. The money investment that person did, already leaves me with tons of questions.

> Truthfully, I don't want to get advice from people who become addicted to AI, sorry. If you sleep on this, these people are going to take your job. I've been writing serious systems code for 15 years. Systems that handled billions of dollars of transaction volume a day and whose hourly outages cost billions of dollars. These are systems you have to design carefully. Active-active, beyond five nines reliable. I'm te…

I don’t want to do twice my workload. I’m old enough to have learned that the faster and more efficient you are, the more demands they pile on you, and the net result is more stress, more expectations for the same pay. AI doesn’t solve unreasonable demands, shifting requirements and looming deadlines, does it?

And still, writing code is not even the bottleneck, the thinking, meeting stakeholders, figuring out technical problems is. What would I do with a machine that spits out bad code.

I guess I’m not cut out for a field where the only metric that counts is how many tickets and lines of code one can churn out in an hour any more.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#113

Post by [deleted] »

Havoc wrote: post #84
shevy-java wrote: post #27

> Today, I use Claude Code for almost all non-trivial programming tasks and have spent $500+ on it just last December. Truthfully, I don't want to get advice from people who become addicted to AI, sorry. The money investment that person did, already leaves me with tons of questions.

Best to also avoid people with LSP and debugger addiction.

[deleted]

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#114

Post by wbsun »

echelon wrote: post #32
shevy-java wrote: post #27

> Today, I use Claude Code for almost all non-trivial programming tasks and have spent $500+ on it just last December. Truthfully, I don't want to get advice from people who become addicted to AI, sorry. The money investment that person did, already leaves me with tons of questions.

> Truthfully, I don't want to get advice from people who become addicted to AI, sorry. If you sleep on this, these people are going to take your job. I've been writing serious systems code for 15 years. Systems that handled billions of dollars of transaction volume a day and whose hourly outages cost billions of dollars. These are systems you have to design carefully. Active-active, beyond five nines reliable. I'm te…

These people are not going to take your job, the people who uses tools smartly while having the knowledge and experience in highly reliable distributed systems are. If human in the loop is not required any more, nobody is going to keep their job.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#115

Post by realusername »

echelon wrote: post #32
shevy-java wrote: post #27

> Today, I use Claude Code for almost all non-trivial programming tasks and have spent $500+ on it just last December. Truthfully, I don't want to get advice from people who become addicted to AI, sorry. The money investment that person did, already leaves me with tons of questions.

> Truthfully, I don't want to get advice from people who become addicted to AI, sorry. If you sleep on this, these people are going to take your job. I've been writing serious systems code for 15 years. Systems that handled billions of dollars of transaction volume a day and whose hourly outages cost billions of dollars. These are systems you have to design carefully. Active-active, beyond five nines reliable. I'm te…

Personally I get a +5% productivity in a good day with AI.

I do double my productivity on personal projects but they aren't entreprise style jobs.

I really hope for those AI companies that my situation isn't too common because burning billions to make dev hobbies more productive doesn't sound too good of a business plan.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#116

Post by JumpCrisscross »

luckylion wrote: post #111
lordnacho wrote: post #12

I 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…

It depends on what you want to achieve as a developer, I think. Having some soft skills makes a lot of things easier, but if you don't have the hard skills to back it up, you'll plateau unless you switch to management before you reach your limit. At the same time, if you're very good at what you do, soft skills are a lot less important. Most of my peers would rather work with brilliant jerk than a friendly average pe…

> if you're very good at what you do, soft skills are a lot less important

Empathy is more than butter. It also lets you uncover why the requirements should be what they are.

There are roles where buried brilliance works. But it’s usually in academia or the military. Not commercial work.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#117

Post by nuancebydefault »

Retric wrote: post #96
pjmlp wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Meetings without any meaningful participation from most people? I guess too many people in the meetings?

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#118

Post by bfung »

echelon wrote: post #32
shevy-java wrote: post #27

> Today, I use Claude Code for almost all non-trivial programming tasks and have spent $500+ on it just last December. Truthfully, I don't want to get advice from people who become addicted to AI, sorry. The money investment that person did, already leaves me with tons of questions.

> Truthfully, I don't want to get advice from people who become addicted to AI, sorry. If you sleep on this, these people are going to take your job. I've been writing serious systems code for 15 years. Systems that handled billions of dollars of transaction volume a day and whose hourly outages cost billions of dollars. These are systems you have to design carefully. Active-active, beyond five nines reliable. I'm te…

Totally agree.

The uncomfortable truth is that the skill of _writing_ code is becoming commoditized.

Reading, understanding, designing efficient systems, and planning changes based on that, at least for now, will still be for human experts (and AI already a great assist here).

But churn out yet another webpage/website? People doing this will need to move on from this as their primary job.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#119

Post by atherton94027 »

echelon wrote: post #32
shevy-java wrote: post #27

> Today, I use Claude Code for almost all non-trivial programming tasks and have spent $500+ on it just last December. Truthfully, I don't want to get advice from people who become addicted to AI, sorry. The money investment that person did, already leaves me with tons of questions.

> Truthfully, I don't want to get advice from people who become addicted to AI, sorry. If you sleep on this, these people are going to take your job. I've been writing serious systems code for 15 years. Systems that handled billions of dollars of transaction volume a day and whose hourly outages cost billions of dollars. These are systems you have to design carefully. Active-active, beyond five nines reliable. I'm te…

Curious, could you give examples of how you've been able to double your productivity with AI?

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#120

Post by nuancebydefault »

veyh wrote: post #89
miav wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this genuinely common? I’ve only ever seen that level of hand holding extended to new grad hires.

I have 13 years of professional experience, and I work in a small company (15 people). Apart from one or two weekly meetings, I mostly just work on stuff independently. I'm the solo developer for a number of projects ranging from embedded microcontrollers to distributed backend systems. There's very little handholding; it's more like requirements come in, and results come out. I have been part of some social circles…

> it's more like requirements come in, and results come out.

Wow someone is very good at setting requirements. I have never seen that in 25 years of dev life.

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