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Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

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Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

#41

Post by watwut »

tome wrote: post #26
watwut wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, there is quite detailed book on that. They were on place, in Germany and occupied territories. Installing machines, designing punch cards with cooperation of users and training users. Some machines were directly in concentration camps and some on railways used to transport Jews. If you got there to maintain, you seen them. Some were used to sort people by race on occupied territories - and even if you not knew…

Do you have any references for that? I'm quite incredulous that American IBM employees were on place, in Germany and occupied territories, during a time that America was engaged in war with Germany.

"IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation" by Edwin Black.

IBM had child company in Germany Dehomag, but transported machines and cards from outside too (including during war through not whole of it). The book however deals more with management and non-German citizens guilt which is harder to show. That people of all sorts in the Germany, including technologistics, were contributing to Nazi plans is easier to believe. It was just first example that came to my mind.

Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

#42

Post by [deleted] »

moduspol wrote: post #25
Judgmentality wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've clearly got an axe to grind. The idea that sociopaths didn't exist in tech before is pretty easy to disprove, unless you think Steve Jobs was a benevolent person. Not to mention Ellison, Kalanick, Khosla, and honestly the list is endless (venture capitalists are famous for being assholes, many would say it's an asset to doing their job). Money attracts assholes, I don't think many people would argue with that…

I think parent poster is drawing a distinction between sociopathy toward capitalistic ends (i.e. making money, providing something of value to someone) and sociopathy toward ideological ends (e.g. social justice, trying to reform the world to be as one believes it should). We always knew about the former, and it's in every industry. The latter is the more recent (and relevant) phenomenon.

[deleted]

Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

#43

Post by aalleavitch »

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…

There's a lot of roles on a team, though, and some of them require "soft skills" more than technical skills. For instance, your scrum master is probably better served by having strong people and management skills and a more general understanding of the technical problems the team is facing on a day-to-day basis rather than a deep understanding of implementation details. The idea wouldn't be to focus on staffing a team full of "soft skills" people, but rather to fill your team with people who cover a broad range of different skill sets applicable to different situations. So maybe you've got a hard computer scientist who can pound out complex implementations in a few seconds; she's probably ultimately going to really appreciate having a teammate who's better at condensing the scatterbrain designer's ideas into a hard set of specs that won't require as many back-and-forth feedback iterations even if said teammate isn't as good of a programmer as she is.

Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

#44

Post by tbrownaw »

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…

But the assumption is wrong and letting non-technical people design products more often than not just leads to badly designed products.

Yes, just like letting the technical people do the design.

Good design uses a separate set of skills, which few people have because few people realize they're important. There is very little correlation between having this set of skills and having the usual set of "hard" technical skills.

Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

#45

Post by kenhwang »

alexanderdmitri wrote: post #40
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;

engineer w/only soft skills = management. Managers have their value too, but you can't only have managers.

Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

#47

Post by nostrademons »

bitL wrote: post #15
specializeded wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We also use it to construct theories about sociopaths infiltrating the industry and realigning the biggest players’ cultures to better suit their sociopath interests when someone suggests people skills might not be irrelevant.

Soft skills are often used as beating sticks on techies by the rest of populace; it's the usual "socially-clueless nerd" song we hear all the time, like we couldn't take care of ourselves. Don't tell me you didn't notice people that lack skills needed for their jobs diverting their attention to their strong aspects, like being "political", and trying to hack other people to believe that their skills are what actually…

"diverting their attention to their strong aspects"

"instead of hard skills coming from years of practice and suffering"

Kinda like you did there? ;-)

Anyway, this is an essential soft skill to have, and one that I suspect more techies exercise than they give themselves credit for. But the response to it is pretty simple: "Alright, if this organization doesn't value the skillset I have, I'll go work for an organization that does, doing a favor for both you, me, and that new organization." After all, why waste resources on something you don't need? The whole point of a market economy is to self-organize so that everyone gets the maximum amount of value out of their skills & talents.

I've pulled this card a couple times (not even as a negotiation tool, but because I honestly wanted to know if I should be spending my time on something else) and gotten back a "No, no, this is actually really important to us, please don't leave or stop doing it."

Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

#48

Post by bitL »

tbrownaw wrote: post #33
bitL wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For example not being kicked out from a platform for no reason, because some MBA needs to fill their quarterly quota of kicked out 3rd party sellers? Not giving sales data on what is selling well to your competitor that in turn would start manufacturing their "essentials" line, copying your product, and undercutting you? Please read what is right now happening with Amazon and tell me you like what it is becoming. Amazon used to be very useful for sellers when it allowed rotating shopping cart so that everyone got some throughput on a single marketplace, paying them some 15% of revenue for this "marketing". This is no longer feasible for most 3rd party sellers; instead Amazon is becoming very restrictive, siding with big brands, more and more rejecting honest businesses and locking them out of their platform.

Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

#49

Post by lhnz »

rosser wrote: post #36
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…

It's not necessarily that people are calling for hard skills to be replaced with soft skills, however they are writing articles in which they imply that soft skills are more valuable than hard skills at Google [1].

It's basic self-interest. If you believe that you're unable to sell your hard skills to an employer, it's in your interest to try to convince people that what you offer (superior generosity, motivational speaking, equality and empathy) will be more likely to bring success to an employer.

People don't need to literally call for hard skills to be replaced because that's not the end-goal. The goal here is that employer's realise that soft skills are more important so that the status of these careers is higher than that of software engineers.

  [1] https://twitter.com/joelgrus/status/945114254922825730

Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

#50

Post by rosser »

lhnz wrote: post #49
rosser wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not necessarily that people are calling for hard skills to be replaced with soft skills, however they are writing articles in which they imply that soft skills are more valuable than hard skills at Google [1]. It's basic self-interest. If you believe that you're unable to sell your hard skills to an employer, it's in your interest to try to convince people that what you offer (superior generosity, motivational s…

That "soft skills are more valuable than hard" is not what I read in that article. It sounds more to me like degrees in STEM correlate less well with success at Google than people expected. Not "negatively" — "less positively", and merely less positively than people anticipated. So what was the "wrong" here? People's assumptions. This is my surprised face.

But I'm probably biased to read it more generously than someone else might be; I was a philosophy major in undergrad, and actively repudiate the ludicrous notion that a broader, more liberal education is somehow wasteful. So YMMV.

EDIT: Look at it this way: you can be the most brilliant technologist in the history of ever. If you're impossible to work with, you're a liability, not an asset. You drive away anyone who tries to work with you, and/or your bus factor is, give or take, ∞.

Once again, "if you're arguing against that, then you're part of the problem."

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