201–210 of 304 posts
I think they're 100% right about that. There's nothing easy or soft about what gets classified as "soft skills".
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> 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 dont want to take responsibility for 10 features at the same time because one guy on the internet is able to bullshit the execs. > I'm easily getting twice my workload done with AI, and I'm not even leveraging the full extent of the tools. I've only just started to do more than fancy tab-autocomplete. Are you getting 2x the money?
Probably no and additionally paying $200/mo out of pocket for the pleasure of doing twice the work.
Now that everyone has a assistant that can work 24/7, talk to customers, get requirements There is no excuse for neglecting hard skills.
What this article calls "soft skills" is largely just experience which is often wrong in tech.
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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.
I'm perfectly happy to have a friendly, average person as my boss, as long as he has good people skills and is pretty good at managing a team. He doesn't need to be technically brilliant at all.
By contrast, working with a boss who's a technically brilliant jerk is an absolutely miserable experience. Companies that make a habit of promoting brilliant jerks into management positions should be avoided.
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I have 13 years of professional experience, and I work in a small company (15 people). Apart from one or two weekly meetings, I mostly just work on stuff independently. I'm the solo developer for a number of projects ranging from embedded microcontrollers to distributed backend systems. There's very little handholding; it's more like requirements come in, and results come out. I have been part of some social circles…
> it's more like requirements come in, and results come out. Wow someone is very good at setting requirements. I have never seen that in 25 years of dev life.
When I was starting my career in Europe as freelance sysadmin, I worked several times for small companies that were definitely not at the forefront of technology, were specialised in some small niche and pretty small (10-15 engineers), but all its engineers had been there for 10-20 years. They pretty well paid compared to the rest of the country, and within their niche (in one case microcontroller programming for industrial robots) they were world experts. They had no intention of moving to another city or another company, nor getting a promotion or learning a new trade. They were simply extremely good at what they were doing (which in the grand scheme of things was probably pretty obsolete technology), and whenever a new project came they could figure out the requirements and implement the product without much external input. The first time I met a "project manager" was when I started working for a US company.
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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…
Not OP, but I did work for a boss once that was technically very strong, but not as strong in terms of planning and scheduling work. It was a very difficult process, because I couldn't deliver what they wanted, as what they wanted changed both during and after delivery. Most things I delivered, which were what we agreed upon before delivery, were rewritten as they did not envision or plan work in advance. Technical s…
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.
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 even obvious to heavily technically minded people, who lament how one kind of engineer would benefit from stronger grasp of other domains. Communication skills, understanding of how to exist within social structures, and all those “soft skills” have the power to multiply the value of the technical skills.
My sense is that the loudest proponents for devaluing soft skills are those who are bad at them and want a moat rather than having to work at them to compete.
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 ren…
But did the company make them a team lead and put him in charge of other people?
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.
It's never easy for a bunch of people, each with differing and partially-overlapping conceptualisations of some domain, to coordinate correctly.
The human problems don't really go away. It requires an insane amount of "context" that would overwhelm any current AI.