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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

#151

Post by BurningFrog »

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 can isolate the brilliant jerk to do something that needs very little coordination with others, that can work.

But at least where I've worked, there wasn't much standalone work like that.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#152

Post by sillywabbit »

Eisenstein wrote: post #121
themafia wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Trotting out fallacy names on regular basis isn't going to win you any points.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#153

Post by themafia »

Eisenstein wrote: post #121
themafia wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> make a valuable process accessible to themselves

I am directly calling into question the "value" of that process. It's also becoming increasingly clear that these tools just whitewash away the copyrights of the materials they were trained on and still mostly reproduce when asked. This would then actually be the destruction of value.

> invoking a a no-true-Scotsman

I did not. This is in response to an article. It demonstrates a clear lack of understanding of professional software engineering and instead imagines that writing a good spec is all there is to actually do. It displays a definite lack of understanding of the fundamentals of engineering or of profitable business.

> is a good example of a lack of soft skills.

You seek appeasement instead of understanding and you call into question my skills? I see now what you think this forum is for.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#154

Post by sublinear »

Do we accuse AI of having poor soft skills when it doesn't do what we want?

I think the problem is knowing how to bridge knowledge gaps. That just comes from experience and there are no shortcuts on either end of the gap.

Empathy does matter a little bit, but to focus so much on it is plain neurotic. Consider how much less friction there is when the interactions can be kept brief. Everyone is already familiar with the various situations and problems that can arise (like on a sports team). That's pure hard skills, not soft skills.

Posts like this are flamebait for the extreme ends of these gaps: stubborn mediocre programmers and arrogant dumb management.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#155

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #129
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rati…

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

Perhaps, but still I think that responses to questioning about an essay that the student did actually write will come a lot more quickly and naturally, even if they indicate that not much thought was put into it, than if they realize they are being called out for cheating and and have to make something up on the spot, since they didn't at least read it carefully!

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#156

Post by JohnLeitch »

sporadicism wrote: post #130
luckylion wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What was his role? How did he slow the project down? I ask because quite often, the value of "soft skills" is exaggerated. In almost 20 years of software engineering I have met some of the worst personalities imaginable. Yet, I cannot think of a single time somebody's personality got in the way to such an extent it slowed the project down. Some problems can't be solved by average people. In such cases, bad social skills with above average intellect will go farther than average intellect with good soft skills.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#158

Post by gambiting »

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…

>>But it's never been the case that a dev could just focus on technical things and not spend any time figuring out the context they are working in, and behaving accordingly.

I've worked with plenty of programmers who were absolutely insufferable human beings but were some kind of supernatural coders who were doing the work of 20 people or were literally the only people who could understand the maths or physics or rendering in our products - so everyone kinda put up with it. I used to know someone who had dozens of HR complaints about them every year and nothing was done because the company didn't think they could risk firing them.

So yeah. They exist. And I don't think AI is going to do much about them, but I'd love to be proven wrong.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#159

Post by marginalia_nu »

watwut wrote: post #99
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 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 nor…

Where did I claim one implied the other?

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#160

Post by layer8 »

win311fwg wrote: post #135
tikhonj wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Do any highly performing teams use tickets? A fly-by-night charlatan successfully pushed ticking into our organization in the past year and I would say it was a disaster. I only have the experience of one, but from that experience I am now not sure you can even build good software that way. I originally hoped it was growing pains, but I see more and more fundamental flaws.

How do you keep track of tasks that need to be done, of reported bugs and feature requests?
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