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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

#101

Post by whstl »

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,…

Even before AI, there was tremendous pressure on developers for NOT going above and beyond.

I have been in far too many situations where a developer had an idea or a prototype it was blocked by a product manager on the grounds of it not being their idea. As a technical manager you then have to burn political capital just to get people to fucking collaborate.

I've also seen way too many situations where developers must do the actual PM gruntwork where the PM wants to pretend they are some kind of svengali tastemaker figure.

Have this for a few years and the psychological safety of any developer is in shambles.

Those environments need to be fucking burned to the ground.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#102

Post by awesome_dude »

My take:

Businesses have valued "cohesion" over "correctness" for some time (at least the last 10 years of my career) with the thinking that they can always eventually get to a correct solution, but teams that aren't cohesive do not work toward the goal they fight amongst themselves until they tear themselves apart (as a former Python dev I have seen teams that have one or two members fight for MONTHS over which set of linters to use)

I also want to say that the only source of "bugs" is misunderstandings - of what the technology does, what the business wants, or what the customer wants (two thirds of that is "soft skills"). We've created DDD to try and address one third of those potential issues, but we're not there yet.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#103

Post by awesome_dude »

straydusk wrote: post #100
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…

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?

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#105

Post by tikhonj »

sbrother wrote: post #85
MattGaiser wrote: post #37

Earlier 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.

I've heard this, and I've even seen it in plenty of poorly performing businesses, but I've never actually seen it in a highly performing, profitable tech company. Other than at the new grad level but it's treated as net-negative training while they learn how to build consensus and scope out work. Not coincidentally, the places I've seen this approach to work are the same places that have hired me as a consultant to b…

A lot of highly performing teams don't even use tickets.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#106

Post by pjmlp »

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.

Never been the case for me, additionally I have always worked in shared desks or offices.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#108

Post by themafia »

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.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#109

Post by Xelbair »

dang wrote: post #95
Xelbair wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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."

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#110

Post by epolanski »

straydusk wrote: post #100
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…

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.

I too met many such developers.

Very often some tech lead or head of could spot them and put them on tasks where they could be autonomous (generally technical but important aspects that bogs down several teams or products: pipelines, tooling, api design, performance, etc).

Some could also be involved in features involving business logic but the lead/PM would make sure to put more details or streamline any feedback/questions through jira.

Also, there's even more developers out there that get complacent on the business aspect after some time of seeing how poor product and business development is, and just phase out of it completely and try to find solace in the technicalities.

If feels sometimes like many on HN live in ultra competitive bubbles with managers pushing people to grow and promote them like it works in Meta and similar, but that's really not the norm, it's the exception.

Many of us work in companies where software is an expense, not an asset, mentality is different, there are no such structures, management and product are crap and you find a wide variety of situations and devs.

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