So, there is professional skills and then there is "soft skills" which at many places is a euphemism for political theatre. Nearly everyone I've ever met has professional skills; few can stomach "soft skills"
Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
231–240 of 304 posts
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#232I 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…
Overall, it'll be a worse world if you can't make a living purely on hard skills. 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 trea…
I'm sorry, but that's nonsense. Soft skills are mostly definitely not about sucking up.
At a previous job, the PM for another team often asked me to join some of their meetings — her engineers were shit at talking to non-technical people, so, for critical meetings, she asked me to join to serve as an interpreter of sorts. That's soft skills at work.
Talking to stakeholders and understanding what they need? Soft skills. Understanding the different between important and urgent? Soft skills. Being able to assess a candidate during an interview? Soft skills. Navigating cultural differences when you have offices or suppliers abroad? Soft skills.
I'd go as far as to say that the single biggest difference between a junior and a senior engineer is how well developed their soft skills are.
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#233Be careful, engineers, when interacting with soft skill experts not to join their reality distortion field where it’s all about coordination, alignment, bizness strategy, clever planning. Whereas the real stuffs are just implémentation details, quickly solved. In the end, they might convince you that 2+2=5.
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Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I was answering to a specific post that doesn’t mention or imply it, plus I mention exactly what you say in my second paragraph which you most certainly missed.
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many people who get into software development before 2010 or so have easily spent hundreds of dollars on dev tools of a similar nature.
Surely, they don't spend $500 per month , though, as the quote implies.
Visual Studio Professional did cost about $500 back in the day, although you ended up getting a perpetual licence for the software and some updates. These days they expect you to have a subscription as with all other business software.
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#236when could we?
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#237I'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,…
Companies have forgotten the value of morale. In this particular sense, AI hype has been very successful in demolishing morale, creating burnouts and overall decreasing value of everyone. Now everyone at the company can build everything in 2 hours, or so I am told.
> everyone at the company can build everything in 2 hours
The business teams can build it in two hours, but those lazy developers spend weeks finishing off the so called last 2% that's somehow always left over after a vibe session.
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Are you getting 2x the money? Probably no and additionally paying $200/mo out of pocket for the pleasure of doing twice the work.
Why would it be out of pocket?
Companies won't even pay for IntellJ, why would they pay for the top tier Claude plan so you can run the 10 agents you need? (and yes it needs to be multiple agents according to their founder [1])
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#239I 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…
Overall, it'll be a worse world if you can't make a living purely on hard skills. 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 trea…
The System rewards yes-men and bullshit-artists and LLMs have come to replace them.
> ifonlyyouknew.jpg
Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
#240I 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…
I neglected soft skills and I survived so far. I'm bad at soft skills and I probably have some sort of mental disorder like autism or something. I don't really care, I don't enjoy interacting with people and I prefer interacting with machines as much as possible. I've found a place that pays me for my technical skills and does not bother me with human interactions, I think there are more places like that in the world…
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