Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

qu8n.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 304 posts

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#241

Post by oreally »

pdpi wrote: post #232
oreally wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 skill…

Perhaps it's a poor choice of words, what I mean by 'sucking up' refers to understanding the counterparty's mind (and making decisions to close the deal), and it is definitely a part of the game.

Every single thing that you listed requires a understanding of the opposing party that you just talked about in order to make the deal work out. A boss has his/her temper to deal with, her engineers have their own preferences, and that sucks, because as I said the game of soft skills can be a cultural landmine equivalent to rolling a dice with unknown odds.

If that is the only game in town, the result could turn out to be like the USA's politics of today, with no way to deviate/defect if you disagree.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#242

Post by whstl »

win311fwg wrote: post #226
whstl wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thing is, Scrum isn't supposed to be something you do for long. 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 th…

I don’t think people invested in Scrum believe it’s “temporary” or ever marketed it as such.

And agile teams are supposed to be self-managed but there’s nothing saying there should be no engineering managers. It sounds counter intuitive, but agile is about autonomy and lack of micro-management, not lack of leadership.

If anything, the one thing those two things reject are “product managers” in lieu of “product owners”.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#244

Post by gambiting »

shiroiuma wrote: post #209
gambiting wrote: post #158

Earlier 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…

>I used to know someone who had dozens of HR complaints about them every year and nothing was done because the company didn't think they could risk firing them. But did the company make them a team lead and put him in charge of other people?

No, luckily. But they were the kind of person who you could casually ask "hey John, what have you been working on" and they would reply with "you're too stupid to understand so I won't bother explaining".

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#245

Post by jampekka »

lolive wrote: post #19

Be 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.

This is actually a soft skill deficiency of not being able to appreciate importance of other people's fields of expertise. Not unlike a hard skill expert's failure to appreciate the importance of soft skills.

People with truly good soft skills are a pleasure to work with even if your soft skills are not that great.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#246

Post by 9JollyOtter »

oblio wrote: post #171
marginalia_nu wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doubt we'll see that in the short term. Long term, possibly, especially if you add a financial crisis. Truth is most larger software development organizations could have even before LLMs downsized significantly and not lost much productivity. The X formerly known as Twitter did this and has been chugging along on a fraction on its original staff count. It's had some brand problems since its acquisition, but those are…

The thing is, Twitter is stuck. It's not growing, most likely it's shrinking. We also have no idea if it's profitable or not. Twitter had a lot of engineers on its payroll to look for the next big thing. If you give that up and keep a skeleton crew, sure, that works. Most businesses don't want to become husks of their former selves.

> Twitter had a lot of engineers on its payroll to look for the next big thing.

What was the "next big thing" before acquisition? There seems to be more features added after the acquisition than before it.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#247

Post by lwhi »

luckylion wrote: post #195
lwhi wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cou…

As someone who's neurodiverse myself, I do want to agree with this. Having said that, I do think it's possible for someone to choose to be an asshole and be neurodiverse at the same time. I wouldn't ever want my neurodiversity to be a free pass for any type of behaviour myself.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#248

Post by class3shock »

Has this ever been something you can ignore? You need to be able to interact with customers, communicate with other team members, mentor junior engineers, etc. I know there is the trope of the abrasive but technically genius engineer but no one wants to work with that person irl.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#249

Post by pdpi »

oreally wrote: post #241
pdpi wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 skill…

Perhaps it's a poor choice of words, what I mean by 'sucking up' refers to understanding the counterparty's mind (and making decisions to close the deal), and it is definitely a part of the game. Every single thing that you listed requires a understanding of the opposing party that you just talked about in order to make the deal work out. A boss has his/her temper to deal with, her engineers have their own preference…

Honestly, the way you conflate soft skills with randomness and capital-P Politics is worrisome.

> Every single thing that you listed requires a understanding of the opposing party that you just talked about in order to make the deal work out.

Yes, that's the whole point! Understanding other people is an important life skill, and something that every neurotypical person should be able to do. (And, if you're not neurotypical, it's a limitation about yourself that you need to acknowledge)

See it this way: You have two people in your team who disagree on a technical issue. You need to help them come to a decision. Would you rather have those two people have the mindset that "other engineers have their own preferences and that sucks", or that they have the mindset that "other engineers have their own preferences as a result of their own experience, and I welcome navigating those differences as part of the job"? Which of those two conversations ends with the two engineers understanding why the other person has a different opinion, and reaching a reasonable compromise? Which conversation ends with everybody involved learning something new, making the team technically stronger?

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#250

Post by mawadev »

nwmcsween wrote: post #231

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"

Feels like soft skills are peddled as if developers don't have "enough" and it is a common assumption by nearly everyone that this is the case. I think of it in a similar way: the magnitude of soft skills you put on display is positively correlated to the difficulty of social interactions at that workplace. Navigating all the nuances, implies how complicated and maybe loaded that environment is. Do one "mistake" regarding social skills and you will face "consequences"?
Post reply on HN