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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

#181

Post by luckylion »

thfuran wrote: post #165
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. If that’s true, you work somewhere very strange. Almost everyone hates dealing with assholes.

People want results. Brilliant assholes produce those, so you tolerate the annoying parts. Would be great if they were also kind, but I'll take a house built by an asshole over a tent erected by a friendly person.

It's not a dichotomy, obviously. There are plenty of very smart people who are also pleasant to be around. But if they're either strong in soft skills _or_ in hard skills, I prefer them being asshole over them not contributing but being nice.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#182

Post by gtowey »

sph wrote: post #112
echelon wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 technic…

In my 20+ years in the tech industry, the most important thing I have learned is that writing code is the least significant part of being a software engineer.

You write code once, but then it's modified endlessly. Supporting and using and improving the code is the majority of the work. LLMs are terrible for that. They tend to write code that isnt easy to read and modify. They don't plan for future use cases. They often paint themselves into a corner with successive modifications, and lose context as the project grows.

Don't worry about your job just yet. We are a long long way from replacing people.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#184

Post by jayd16 »

durandal1 wrote: post #177

I've had a long career in software and my conclusions is that if soft skills are valued over hard skills, the organization is already captured by talentless engineers and leaders. There are holdouts in the world, where execution is king, find those places and run away from soft skill fortresses. This is more true than even with LLM-amplified productivity.

This is a bit confusing. Execution requires both soft and hard skills.

I think you're conflating "soft skills have value" with an org run by bullshitters.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#185

Post by greesil »

jayd16 wrote: post #184
durandal1 wrote: post #177

I've had a long career in software and my conclusions is that if soft skills are valued over hard skills, the organization is already captured by talentless engineers and leaders. There are holdouts in the world, where execution is king, find those places and run away from soft skill fortresses. This is more true than even with LLM-amplified productivity.

This is a bit confusing. Execution requires both soft and hard skills. I think you're conflating "soft skills have value" with an org run by bullshitters.

Not conflating, the parent is saying it's correlated.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#186

Post by whstl »

JohnLeitch wrote: post #156
sporadicism wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ski…

I know an example. A tech lead who would demand every single task to be done in certain ways and go through a certain processes. Invading other team's PRs and slack channels in order to pick fights because they weren't using his microservice or his libraries. Claiming "if you're not working like us, then you're wrong". Asking people to make PRs but then not approving. Before being demoted, his team had ZERO new features delivered for about a quarter. To me that's an example of slowing down teams.

But if you mean you want someone "brilliant, but an asshole", then I agree with you. I find that the common examples are more about incompetent managers who can't make the best of an IC who can work well in isolation.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#187

Post by mathgeek »

durandal1 wrote: post #177

I've had a long career in software and my conclusions is that if soft skills are valued over hard skills, the organization is already captured by talentless engineers and leaders. There are holdouts in the world, where execution is king, find those places and run away from soft skill fortresses. This is more true than even with LLM-amplified productivity.

Like most of these binary statements, the truth is indeed somewhere in the middle. Software engineers don't require focus on getting beyond acceptable with soft skills. Software engineers who want to move into staff/managements/product/etc. need to focus on them.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#188

Post by whstl »

luckylion wrote: post #181
thfuran wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

People want results. Brilliant assholes produce those, so you tolerate the annoying parts. Would be great if they were also kind, but I'll take a house built by an asshole over a tent erected by a friendly person. It's not a dichotomy, obviously. There are plenty of very smart people who are also pleasant to be around. But if they're either strong in soft skills _or_ in hard skills, I prefer them being asshole over t…

Very often in my experience, people with too many soft skills and too little hard skills are at best dead weights, at worst con men, which are a special kind of asshole you REALLY don't want to deal with.

Of course the best is to have both hard/soft skills, which is not as rare as people assume.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#189

Post by luckylion »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #116
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…

> 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.

I have no experience with the military and very little with working in academia, but a lot with commercial work, and I've seen it work many times. Clearly those people wouldn't be the ones talking to customers or leading teams, but it's worth a lot to have someone that can tackle hard problems.

I'm not at all saying that you can only have one or the other, or that soft skills don't matter at all. It's just my experience that output matters a lot more than people say in these types of conversations.

To me looks a lot more like the cliche Diva in music - are you really going to not work with someone extremely talented just because they're difficult to work with and you wouldn't want to hang out with them?

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#190

Post by whstl »

win311fwg wrote: post #131
nuancebydefault wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That is likely referring to what has become known as the standup, where developers read off the commit log for the "manager" who hasn't yet figured out how to use a computer.

Or for the product manager too lazy to check Jira.
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