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Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

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Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

#31

Post by et1337 »

zug_zug wrote: post #7

tl; dr: 1. Author observes that he's witnessed a lot of emotional backlash to the suggestion that soft skills may outweigh hard skills in tech; suggests the emotionality of the reaction is indicative that engineers worry it just may be true. 2. Justifies the importance of soft skills by citing personal experience of teams of 100s+ people needing to be coordinated 3. Proposes that a [software] system's interaction wit…

Thanks for the tldr!

> 3. Proposes that a [software] system's interaction with the outside world is a larger problem than the system itself [i.e. UX tougher than code]

I hate this mindset that tries to divorce UX and code. If you're making a CRUD app, don't think of it as a tiny pure nugget of reusable API goodness surrounded by an unfortunate layer of messy UI that has to deal with the real world. The app IS that messy UI code. The rest is just a database schema. Don't try to abstract away your job.

Of course UX and code are different, but I think they're inseparable and anyone doing either should have a firm grasp of the other.

Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

#32

Post by ionforce »

tome wrote: post #2

I appreciate the content of the article but I can't help picking up a dose of disrespect from the author towards exactly the collection of people he is trying to persuade.

Who do you think the author is trying to persuade and where did you detect disrespect?

Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

#33

Post by tbrownaw »

bitL wrote: post #19
alexashka wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what do you propose? It doesn't take much to poke holes in the way things are - it's a lot harder to do something about it, other than 'raising awareness' aka complaining.

There are some things ongoing by people that realize what is happening, for example in the blockchain space. Blockchain beside attempting to solve cool tech problem of Byzantine generals was also motivated by increasing transparency, i.e. removing or disclosing corruption by money means. There is more work done right now to prevent dominant intermediaries like Amazon from increasingly abusing their position by removi…

There is more work done right now to prevent dominant intermediaries like Amazon from increasingly abusing their position by removing the need to use their platform at all and move it to a p2p blockchain instead.

So, those small online stores didn't used to all be on Amazon or Ebay. Which means those platforms must be providing something that the store proprietors think is worth losing some of their independence over.

What is that "something", and what does the blockchain do to provide it that just getting an account with a payment processor doesn't do?

Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

#34

Post by bjourne »

quotemstr wrote: post #18

The recent trend toward replacing technical acumen with "soft skills" is disturbing. Let's dispense with a strawman: of course interacting with other people is necessary. But there are lots of people out there who said the "tech stuff" is easy and it's the coordination and empathy and stuff that's the real challenge. That's a dangerous perspective no matter which of the two ways you interpret it. One interpretation i…

I agree with this. The argument I have heard a million times is that technical people can't understand non-technical people's (whatever "non-technical" mean, partitioning people as either technical/hard or non-technical/soft is dumb) perspectives. Therefore, for a product to succeed, it needs to be designed by non-technical people. But the assumption is wrong and letting non-technical people design products more often than not just leads to badly designed products.

Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

#35

Post by newman8r »

quotemstr wrote: post #18

The recent trend toward replacing technical acumen with "soft skills" is disturbing. Let's dispense with a strawman: of course interacting with other people is necessary. But there are lots of people out there who said the "tech stuff" is easy and it's the coordination and empathy and stuff that's the real challenge. That's a dangerous perspective no matter which of the two ways you interpret it. One interpretation i…

I also feel like this particular article fails to address the intrapersonal aspects of 'soft skills' and mostly considers the interpersonal issues.

Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

#36

Post by rosser »

quotemstr wrote: post #18

The recent trend toward replacing technical acumen with "soft skills" is disturbing. Let's dispense with a strawman: of course interacting with other people is necessary. But there are lots of people out there who said the "tech stuff" is easy and it's the coordination and empathy and stuff that's the real challenge. That's a dangerous perspective no matter which of the two ways you interpret it. One interpretation i…

Please cite examples of calls for "replacing" hard skills with soft. That's far more a straw man than the one you "dispense with" — conveniently distracting from your own, I might add. I'm hearing a call for recognizing their value as complementary and essential in their own, independent ways. Soft skills do not supplant hard skills, but either is worth less without the other.

If you're arguing against that, then you're part of the problem.

It's also what we call a "false dilemma" to suggest that your proffered interpretations for this "trend" are the only interpretations for it.

Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

#37

Post by skybrian »

KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #27

I don't understand what are these soft skills the author is talking about. To me, it seems like he's talking about manipulating and deceiving people. Why is it good for a manager to be skilled at creating the impression that he/she respects his reports?

It's certainly vague but that's an uncharitable interpretation. I'd say it's more like not inadvertently offending or demoralizing people, not accidentally starting arguments, and so on.

Mistakes in communication happen easily, so it's good to be skilled enough to avoid them or recover quickly.

Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

#38

Post by newman8r »

jschwartzi wrote: post #4
0xcde4c3db wrote: post #3

While I broadly agree with the author's characterization and summary of the importance of "real" soft skills, that seems to be a tiny slice of how the term is used. I've seen discussions of soft skills cover a ridiculously broad assortment of actual skills, cultural sensitivities, in-group identity behaviors, personality traits, and neurological aptitudes. Without being a lot clearer about the scope, I think there's…

Mostly soft skills represent your ability to react rationally and appropriately to your own emotions and to the emotions of others--even emotions that you're anticipating and not just experiencing. The most basic soft skill in my mind is empathy, which is your ability to anticipate how others will feel in a given situation. If you're not capable of empathy I do not want you as my manager.

I choose intuition over empathy, but clearly they're both important.

Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

#39

Post by skybrian »

bjourne wrote: post #34
quotemstr wrote: post #18

The recent trend toward replacing technical acumen with "soft skills" is disturbing. Let's dispense with a strawman: of course interacting with other people is necessary. But there are lots of people out there who said the "tech stuff" is easy and it's the coordination and empathy and stuff that's the real challenge. That's a dangerous perspective no matter which of the two ways you interpret it. One interpretation i…

I agree with this. The argument I have heard a million times is that technical people can't understand non-technical people's (whatever "non-technical" mean, partitioning people as either technical/hard or non-technical/soft is dumb) perspectives. Therefore, for a product to succeed, it needs to be designed by non-technical people. But the assumption is wrong and letting non-technical people design products more ofte…

What's an example of a product that was badly designed because the product designer wasn't technical enough?

Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

#40

Post by alexanderdmitri »

bitL wrote: post #5

Given many folks use tech to escape real-world interaction with messy, untrustworthy and corrupt people, finding their fantasy world in getting awesome things done, I doubt the hard skills will be replaced by soft ones. This is actually a symptom of sociopathic tendencies taking over tech which is a marker for "dark ages" coming, and neutralizing any progress coming from tech. The sociopaths finally figured out tech…

I think the way to look at it is soft skills can compliment the hard skills, but any engineer w/out the hard skills has nothing to compliment:

engineer w/ hard skills = solid;

engineer w/ hard + soft skills = powerful;

engineer w/only soft skills = useless;

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