221–230 of 304 posts
Everyone hated him but the CEO loved him since he thought he was their golden ticket to the promised land.
At some point he went with us to a shooting range for target practice, immediately after he developed a fascination for guns, he never threatened anyone, but one day he buys a Kevlar vest and tells all his fellow devs.
The following Monday was his last day..
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The trouble isn't that they would convince me with their reality distortion (they don't), the issue is that they are satisfied with their "progress" while I'm still asking crucial questions (which they ignore, b/c they don't see the importance).
Part of the soft skills that are useful for a developer is being able to frame your crucial questions in a way that makes their importance relevant to their world.
It won't help. LLMs are good at soft skills, too. There's a whole "AI girlfriend" industry, and it's quite successful.
LLMs are not good at soft skills, just the girlfriends you can get in this society are even worse.
WTF?
Dehumanizing people into a collective, way to go. Do you expect to assimilate them, Borg style?
https://youtu.be/hNuu9CpdjIo?si=FkbWtFMKunwjxcen
(Office Space)
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…
I think you need to be more specific than just "avert" the trope without elaborating. Others have commented how a brilliant jerk can slow a project down, but I get the impression that you are thinking of someone who is not sociable, not interested in business goals, very direct and perhaps even pessimistic about others' ability, but hand them a technical task and they can deliver exceptional results. This is opposed to, say, someone who is sociable but can't deliver anything without constant attention or handholding.
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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.
As you no doubt know, Agile is ultimately about eliminating managers from the picture, thinking that software is better developed when developers work with each other and the customer themselves without middlemen. Which, in hindsight, sounds a lot like my previous comment, funnily enough, although I didn't have Agile in mind when I wrote it.
Except in the real world, one day up and deciding no more managers on a whim would lead to chaos, so Scrum offered a "training wheels" method to facilitate the transition, defining practices that push developers into doing things they normally wouldn't have to do with a manager behind them. Once developers are comfortable and into a routine with the new normal Scrum intends for you to move away from it.
The problem: What manager wants to give up their job? So there has always been an ongoing battle to try and bastardize it such that the manager retains relevance. The good news, if you can call it that, is that we as a community have finally wisened up to it and now most pretty well recognize it for what it is instead of allowing misappropriation of the "Agile" label. The bad news is that, while we're getting better at naming it, we're not getting better at dealing with it.
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Part of the soft skills that are useful for a developer is being able to frame your crucial questions in a way that makes their importance relevant to their world.
Remember, technical workers, you must grind all you soft skills in addition to the technical ones, so that you can successfully interact with those people hired exclusively to use their soft skills.
Engineers who struggle to do that are just as bad at their job as business managers who aren’t technical enough to operate Microsoft Office. There’s a minimum of both hard and soft skills that anyone in a professional environment should have.
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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?
> Are you getting 2x the money? Probably no and additionally paying $200/mo out of pocket for the pleasure of doing twice the work.
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…
If soft skills is mostly about sucking up, and there is no demand for any hard skill, you'll find society less able to stand up to the pressures of a majority group, because guess what, they're all too scared to stand up as an individual for fear of dropping the ball on the soft skill.
Moreover, the game theory of the soft skill is treacherous and uncertain. There's too many unknown unknowns, it's like not knowing if the dice you're playing is loaded against you. You don't know how many cultural land mines you might step on when interacting with your superior, or if there's a glass ceiling enforced by a group who will nitpick on minor irrelevant 'faults'.
Whereas compare soft skills to hard skills, you have a major advantage in certainty. There is a dice loaded in your favor. You know you can get much of the stuff done, and once you've reached the desired results, that's all there is to it.
I also could go on on how soft skills erodes human's capacity for judging what is value, instead basing their opinions on the majority source of opinions... It'll definitely be a much more irrational world to live in.
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> 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 experie…
Oh, absolutely. My point is those personalities are almost common in the military and academia. They’re rarer in commerce because there aren’t that many niches where hard problems exist independent of peoples’ preferences. (As in, choosing how to scope the hard problem is part of what makes it hard. And the scoping that works best isn’t going to be found in isolation from customers and others working on the problem.)