Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills • Hacker News Board

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#281

Post by luckylion » Mon, Jan 19, 2026, 6:18 PM UTC

Balinares wrote: post #273

luckylion wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People want results. Brilliant assholes produce those, so you tolerate the annoying parts. Would be great if they were also kind, but I'll take a house built by an asshole over a tent erected by a friendly person. It's not a dichotomy, obviously. There are plenty of very smart people who are also pleasant to be around. But if they're either strong in soft skills _or_ in hard skills, I prefer them being asshole over t…

Hard disagree. I've yet to see a "brilliant asshole" with anywhere near the kind results I expect from my teams. The usual pattern is your typical asshole will ship broken stuff and then blame everyone else for the breakages. Now, average assholes who self-promote as brilliant and hope no one will see through their crap, sure, plenty of those. I'd recommend against failing to see through their crap, though. They'll m…

Maybe you had those average assholes masquerading as brilliant? I don't know that of course, but "ships broken stuff" doesn't sound particularly brilliant to me.

I'm thinking of the type that builds things that you can stack up against the output of others and comes out miles ahead. I have one of those in my team, and it feels like a force of nature: he independently does in a month what a team of five did in three, and his work is of better quality. Of course I'll cut him a lot more slack.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#282

Post by luckylion » Mon, Jan 19, 2026, 6:29 PM UTC

jhanschoo wrote: post #225

luckylion wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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,…

Yes, absolutely. I'm not talking about people who are not sociable _and_ can't produce, but people who don't care about your feelings, but are very strong in their work.

In other comments, it felt like they focused very much on the "low in soft skills" part without looking at the other skills being extended. Of course, someone who is unpleasant to work with and only writes buggy software will not help a project progress. But someone you don't want to spend time with but who carries your team through the project with his skill and productivity is a very different story.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#283

Post by Klonoar » Mon, Jan 19, 2026, 8:35 PM UTC

KellyCriterion wrote: post #254

ragall wrote: post #199

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. 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…

Yes, but it goes more far than that: You will have to participate in meetings, you will be asked to joing for a lunch, you will be asked to contact a customer/devcontact there, you will be asked to attend some events, you will be asked to communicate with others etc. You are not existing as isolated particle in vacuum behind your screen :-)

I have seen a number of organizations throughout my 20 ish year career that have a policy of “developers don’t meet with customers”.

I am not endorsing it and I think it’s poor form, but it absolutely exists. You are in a weird bubble if you think there haven’t been engineering jobs where a dev could only care about code.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#284

Post by ethbr1 » Mon, Jan 19, 2026, 9:01 PM UTC

woooooo wrote: post #275

ethbr1 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was trying to subtly point out that the information asymmetry goes both ways: most devs aren't aware of what their managers are doing for the team either. More transparency in both directions is healthy (and skip-level meetings, for god's sake).

Yeah, I hear you and I also added a parenthetical that the incentives aren't always the same. In an organization of high-minded individuals, the information asymmetry goes both ways, I've been a manager and a dev and I tried to be high-minded and do my best to smooth that assymetry for the greater good in both roles. But sometimes, especially the last 3-4 years since it got tough, there's a lot of people trying to ho…

Absolutely! The "How does a bad manager with a good team ever get identified/fired?" problem is something more companies should have an answer to.

That's why I think skip-levels check-ins and direct reports regularly anonymously rating their manager (via HR) should be the starting place at all companies.

Otherwise, toxic (or just underperforming) managers stay in their positions longer than is good for the company.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#285

Post by proof_by_vibes » Mon, Jan 19, 2026, 9:52 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #170

benttoothpaste wrote: post #58

I'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,…

> These posts definitely contribute to the declining morale among employees. Nobody goes "above and beyond" anymore - we just strictly doing the tickets and nothing more. I think those posts exist in a bubble. They only escaped the bubble because someone wanted to use them once over to unite a different group of people against a different set of bad guys, ironically continuing the cycle. This time it’s devs loathing…

I would not go as far to say that they exist in a bubble. I quit my job as an engineer because this exact sentiment from my boss was ruining my life.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#286

Post by jolmg » Mon, Jan 19, 2026, 11:01 PM UTC

benttoothpaste wrote: post #58

I'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,…

> There is also longer form business fan fiction. It usually follows this template: there is a hero - a humble manager/sales person, and a villain - a cocky, nerdy software developer. The villain claims that some task is impossible or takes months to complete. Then the humble hero (equipped with Opus 4.5) completes the task in 2 hours. The villain is then humiliated/fired and everyone lives happily ever after.

Can you share examples? I've never seen something like that.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#287

Post by lumirth » Mon, Jan 19, 2026, 11:02 PM UTC

I have always said this: life is other people. Jobs and employment are necessarily a reflection of the fact that we need each other to survive. We do not hunt the meat we consume, we did not deliver ourselves, and the vast majority of us won’t build the bed we die in.

Soft skills were never optional.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#288

Post by shiroiuma » Tue, Jan 20, 2026, 12:01 AM UTC

whstl wrote: post #188

luckylion wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People want results. Brilliant assholes produce those, so you tolerate the annoying parts. Would be great if they were also kind, but I'll take a house built by an asshole over a tent erected by a friendly person. It's not a dichotomy, obviously. There are plenty of very smart people who are also pleasant to be around. But if they're either strong in soft skills _or_ in hard skills, I prefer them being asshole over t…

Very often in my experience, people with too many soft skills and too little hard skills are at best dead weights, at worst con men, which are a special kind of asshole you REALLY don't want to deal with. Of course the best is to have both hard/soft skills, which is not as rare as people assume.

>Very often in my experience, people with too many soft skills and too little hard skills are at best dead weights, at worst con men

No, these are the people who should be moved into management positions. They can spend time on all the soft-skill stuff that ICs don't want to spend time on, like dealing with upper management, leading meetings, etc. They don't need to have the best hard skills, just enough to understand at a higher level and communicate with others in and out of the organization, and they can refer to the experts in their teams when they need more detail.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#289

Post by shiroiuma » Tue, Jan 20, 2026, 12:06 AM UTC

ragall wrote: post #205

nuancebydefault wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I've seen that plenty of times. I suspect that you haven't seen it because you live in a place with high cost of living, which induces a high turnover in personnel, or perhaps you've been working in very dynamic markets such as SaaS. 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 som…

>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

This isn't possible in the USA. Companies like this (small, and not in tech hub cities) always try to take advantage of their location and pay peanuts, with the excuse "the cost of living is lower here!", even though it's not that much lower (and not as low as they think), and everything besides houses costs the same nationwide.

Re: Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

#290

Post by shiroiuma » Tue, Jan 20, 2026, 12:15 AM UTC

bartread wrote: post #219

vbezhenar wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I think there are more places like that in the world. There are but not as many as we might like. I’d say I’ve learned to be decent on the soft skills side but it comes at a cost and the need to overutilise them can be incredibly draining. So many places run Agile so it feels like software engineering for noisy extroverts but, to me, it just makes it so hard to get anything done, and I see others struggling the sam…

>So many places run Agile so it feels like software engineering for noisy extroverts but, to me, it just makes it so hard to get anything done, and I see others struggling the same way.

Interesting. I'm very introverted too, but I worked at one Agile place, and it was like a dream for me. Maybe it was just the way they implemented it. What I liked was that I didn't need to talk to people much, outside of the bi-weekly planning meetings (which were large enough that I didn't have to actually speak up much). Instead, we used Jira to track everything: tasks were broken down into tickets, and I could see at a glance what everyone on the team was working on at the time, what work remained to be done, etc. When I finished a task and put it up for review, I could just go find another unassigned ticket and grab that and start working on it, instead of having to talk to anyone (like the boss). We did a lot of code review too, but here again, it was all through Jira/Gitlab/etc., not in person. So I could spend time reviewing other people's merge requests, writing my comments, etc.

The only time I really needed to talk to team members was 1) during the morning stand-up, which was quick, 2) during the bi-weekly sprint review and sprint planning meetings, and 3) if someone was stuck and wanted to work together in-person on a problem (not often).

By contrast, I'm now stuck in a poorly-run place doing waterfall development, and it's awful. I don't know what anyone is working on usually, because everything is verbal (we do use Jira, but I can only see my own pre-assigned tasks), I don't have a good idea of what the group is doing, the timeline for anything, how anything is progressing, if there's other things I could help with or add input to before someone goes the wrong direction, etc. The manager just runs thing in a completely authoritarian manner. I wish I could just go back to my old Agile workplace.