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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

#121

Post by Eisenstein »

themafia wrote: post #108
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's the vibe coders who would love to pretend that the opposite end of the spectrum from them is "artisinal coding." They honestly have no idea what "software engineering" in a professional context even looks like. So they come up with this prattle.

Blaming people who use technology to make a valuable process accessible to themselves and then invoking a a no-true-Scotsman in order to defend the status quo is a good example of a lack of soft skills.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#122

Post by luckylion »

throw-the-towel wrote: post #104
Animats wrote: post #97

It won't help. LLMs are good at soft skills, too. There's a whole "AI girlfriend" industry, and it's quite successful.

LLMs are not good at soft skills, just the girlfriends you can get in this society are even worse.

I consider "understanding what people want when they well you" part of soft skills, and LLMs are good at that.

I've know a few non-developers who use AI to solve the things they need. Nothing huge, it's not anything amazing, but what impressed me is how well the process works for them. They describe what they want in very vague terms with a lot of contradictions and in convoluted stream-of-thought paragraphs. But it mostly works, and LLMs produce something that's very close to what they want, and they get to their desired result with a few iterations.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#123

Post by aleph_minus_one »

benttoothpaste wrote: post #58

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,…

> 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.

I do have the impression that many programmers are much more resistant to bullshitting, and love to call out the mistakes when confronted with bullshit. Getting into management, on the other hand, means believing in instead of fighting lots bullshit.

So, of course the mentioned CEO gets lots of such stories in his xitter/linkedin feeds; CEOs are not insanely eager to comment on such stories why the premises are wrong, and by which dirty tricks this manipulates people. Rather, by climbing up the company ranks, they actively had to believe in more and more fairy tables (or bullshit); if they are too resistant to the brainwashing that they have to believe in, they will stop climbing ranks.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#124

Post by dang »

Xelbair wrote: post #109
dang wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't cross into personal attack.

It wasn't a directed statement but a general one. "Conflict is essential to human life, whether between different aspects of oneself, between oneself and the environment, between different individuals or between different groups."

The obvious default interpretation of your comment is that the other person is using something as an excuse. If you say you did not intend it as a personal putdown, I believe you, but the rest of us don't have direct access to your intent, so you'd need to include enough information in your comments to disambiguate it.

More information here in case helpful: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

As for Marion Milner's classic paragraph, I'm delighted that you found it worthwhile enough to quote! But you have to read the entire paragraph to understand it, and you can't leave out the word "toleration". That's the most important word there, both in the text and in the title.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#125

Post by robocat »

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…

> [people without soft skills] were always the extreme intelligence outliers

This is a B-player myth.

High intelligence makes you better at soft skills. People are complex, and being good at soft skills takes intelligence, intelligence to intuit the importance and see the patterns of soft skills.

It is true that if you have high skills that a business needs, you can choose to ignore many internal norms of dress or etiquette.

And also as your status goes up, the more you don't need to care about signaling, and some people do counter-signalling. I always think of this: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/lifestyle/article-9233455/Prince...

Unfortunately it is also true that some people think that acting badly will give them cred (reversing the causality that having cred permits bad behaviour). Was Sam-Bankman-Fried acting that cryptic appearance? Do executives also model their behaviour by rewatching The Apprentice or Gordon Ramsay?

Disclaimer: That's mostly my personal opinion, from watching people smarter than I. Then again I'm no genius, nor do I win status games, so perhaps I'm just ignorant. I've definitely seen some less talented try and put on an act leading to a pratfall. Also many of the smartest people I know left school at 15.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#126

Post by veyh »

nuancebydefault wrote: post #120
veyh wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of course, sometimes people realize that what they asked for wasn't actually what was needed.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#127

Post by bdangubic »

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…

I respectfully disagree. Over 3 decades as SWEs I have seen many devs who did absolutely nothing but hack - two of them were autistic too. The “everything is numbers” is small fraction of the industry but perhaps since this is HN maybe resonates more with people?

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#128

Post by 9rx »

awesome_dude wrote: post #103
straydusk wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That really sounds like a PM complaining that "I have to do my actual job of being the bridge between the business and the engineering team" ALL PMs are expected to be doing some translation, otherwise what's the point of their job?

> otherwise what's the point of their job?

Who else is going to move a box from one column to another?

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#129

Post by aleph_minus_one »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #83
LatencyKills wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mentor CS students at two local universities. The best students are using gen ai to enhance their learning and understanding (i.e. they use it as a tool instead of a crutch). The worst students are using it in attempt to “level the playing field” and are failing miserably. It is easy to determine if someone solved a problem using AI because they can’t explain or recreate “their” solution. Detecting cheating in essa…

You could probably detect essay cheating (AI written) in the exact same way by questioning the student about it - why did they organize the essay in this way, what was their motivation for focusing on X, or expressing something as Y... Of course anyone can concoct an explanation on the fly, but it should be obvious if they are speaking from the experience of having authored it or just coming up with a post-hoc ration…

> You could probably detect essay cheating (AI written) in the exact same way by questioning the student about it - why did they organize the essay in this way, what was their motivation for focusing on X, or expressing something as Y... Of course anyone can concoct an explanation on the fly, but it should be obvious if they are speaking from the experience of having authored it or just coming up with a post-hoc rationalization.

I wouldn't claim that I am bad at writing (at least in my native language, which is not English) - at least many colleagues say so. But I do insist that when writing I don't think that way. If I were to answer these question, my honest answers would be:

"why did they organize the essay in this way": I just wrote down the thoughts that came to my mind, and then gave them some structure that seemed right.

"what was their motivation for focusing on X": Either "because it felt right" or "I had to write at most x pages, and indeed it would have made sense to focus on more topics, so I focused on this arbitrary thing"

So indeed I would claim that a lot of sensible reasons why things are this way actually are post-hoc rationalizations. :-)

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#130

Post by sporadicism »

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…

> Most of my peers would rather work with brilliant jerk than a friendly average person

I worked with one of these. Every interaction was miserable and stomach-turning. He slowed the project down in a number of ways. A friendly average person would have been a net gain.

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