"I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people, can't you understand that? WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!"
Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
161–170 of 304 posts
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#162> 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.
I think this tongue in cheek comparison would make more sense if it were possible to spend more than 50 cents on an LSP or debugger over the course of a lifetime.
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 de…
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Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#164> 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'm easily getting twice my workload done with AI, and I'm not even leveraging the full extent of the tools.
It seems that every person who says this never elaborates on the nature of their work. What exactly are you writing? What languages? Technologies? What does the LLM assist with? In what ways does it hamper more than help?
I ask these questions because I have yet to see any meaningful, real world application of AI at my job. There's definitely interest, but every exploratory effort seems to fall flat, sometimes comedically so e.g. recently we had Sonnet 4.5 recommend some JavaScript for a UI hang we were looking into. It also recommended we use WebWorkers to improve perf. Sounds great. Looks great, with nice markdown and whatnot. Too bad it was a legacy MFC application written in C and C++.
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#165I 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.
If that’s true, you work somewhere very strange. Almost everyone hates dealing with assholes.
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Previously? There was an understanding of the problem trying to be solved. The gaps left the pangs of "this isn't right".
Now I have no way to know where things stand. It's all disconnected and abstracted. The ticket may suggest that something is done, but if the customer isn't happy, it isn't actually. Worse, now we have people adding tickets without any intent to do the work themselves and there isn't a great way to determine if they're just making up random work, which is something that definitely happens sometimes, or if it truly reflects on what the customer needs.
You might say that isn't technically a problem with ticketing itself, and I would agree. The problems are really with what came with the ticketing. But what would you need tickets for other than to try and eliminate the customer from the picture? If you understand the problem alongside the customer, you know what needs to be done just as you know when you need to eat lunch. Do you create 'lunchtime' tickets for yourself? I've personally never found the need.
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#167I 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.
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Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#168I 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 ren…
There are lots of developers who are able to lean into their inclination to be non-communicative. In many cases I think this inclination is at least partly due to neuro diversity; but I've met some who are simply genuinely unpleasant.
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Curious, could you give examples of how you've been able to double your productivity with AI?
In my (not systems engineering) opinion, most time spent writing code is boilerplate and rituals; unit tests are pretty repetitive, creating a React component is a lot of repetition, etc. A LLM code assistant can do these boring things faster.
Yeah I agree with you on that, I'm just curious about the systems programming use case as in my experience you have to think deep about interactions and working with an agent blunts that
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#170I'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,…
> These posts definitely contribute to the declining morale among employees. Nobody goes "above and beyond" anymore - we just strictly doing the tickets and nothing more.
I think those posts exist in a bubble. They only escaped the bubble because someone wanted to use them once over to unite a different group of people against a different set of bad guys, ironically continuing the cycle. This time it’s devs loathing management instead of management loathing devs.
All of the great people I’ve worked with don’t play any of these games at all. They know it’s a sideshow of engagement bait and content generated with a goal of being controversial, not truthful.