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Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
191–200 of 304 posts
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
I find that the current way we do Scrum is way more waterfall-ish than what we had before. Managers just walked around and talked, and knew what each person was doing.
We traded properly working on problems for the Kafkaesque nightmare of modern development.
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#193The 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 et…
Intelligence scales with social skills.
Unless you have a condition like autism which allows skewed development, which a lot software engineers do have.
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#194I'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.
> There are holdouts in the world, where execution is king, find those places and run away from soft skill fortresses.
And guess what do you need to execute? Both soft and hard skills. You'll not live long without both of them and this is even more true today.
It's useless estimating the ratio between soft and hard skills without context, sometimes projects fail for one, sometimes for the other.
The big truth is that as the markets get more competitive, the employee pool follows the same trend: it's not 2021 anymore, world has changed, great developers that have both hard and soft skills can be found in the market and it's up to a competent hiring team to find them.
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>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.
To the outside, the difference is hard to tell, isn't it? Between neuro-diversity and genuine unpleasantness -- isn't it mostly that one has a diagnosis (that you know of) and the other does not?
You might change your moral judgement of someone's behavior if you find out they have this or that condition (at least I do), but it doesn't change how their behavior impacts you, does it? If it did, I think the best you could do is to assume that everyone has some sort of condition that makes them act the way they do, and it'll be less of a problem.
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
Totally agree. The uncomfortable truth is that the skill of _writing_ code is becoming commoditized. Reading, understanding, designing efficient systems, and planning changes based on that, at least for now, will still be for human experts (and AI already a great assist here). But churn out yet another webpage/website? People doing this will need to move on from this as their primary job.
>But churn out yet another webpage/website? People exaggerate how many people work on just simple websites / webpages. Anyone needing a website has been able to get it for very cheap for a long time.
Yep. It has been the case forever. The reason we keep/kept getting new tools is because laymen would exhaust their capabilities in the old tools and started requiring a developer once they need THAT ONE feature.
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#197Thank Open Source and Free Software which commodified hard skills and pushed business to value them as zero.
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 feat…
What you describe is definitely not a person with hard skills, so it's not relevant to the current discussion.
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#199I 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.
This is factually wrong. Until a few decades ago in tech, and it's still like that in most economic sectors and I dare say most countries, it's the managers that take the role of figuring out the organization and interfacing with other teams. An engineer being only in charge of technical issues but nothing business-related was the norm; that would yield no promotion into management, of course, but still the norm.
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#200Earlier 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…
Every PR has to match their way exactly.
The logic, the method names, the test names, code in the log messages.
Does not matter what the output or complexity is, does not matter how the previous state of the code in the area looks like, it. Must. Look. And. Read. Their. Way.
A 3 file PR review can take weeks. There was once a PR for a new feature that took 1.5 years and 2 developers (the og op left the company 3 months into having opened this PR) to eventually merge.