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Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

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Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

#51

Post by adrianratnapala »

skybrian wrote: post #39
bjourne wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You have to see it from the inside to be sure that this (rather than some other pathology) is going on, so I will give an example from my own work.

I wrote a design program for [thingys] that were basically rectangles, but could have circular arcs instead of straight line edges. A user could fake a circle using two semicircles joined by zero length edges.

The PM saw this and wanted a circular [thingy] feature. He could not understand that it was only a fake circle, such that when the user started changing things, (literal!) corner cases would crop up. Over time, he kept demanding new features that implicitly relied on non-fake circles. And of course this just kept throwing up more confusing corner cases that he kept trying to paper over with new features.

This is one example of a HUGE class of problems that come down to managers just wishing away a mismatch between the way data and code actually work, and the features that they would like to have.

Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

#52

Post by wwweston »

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…

So there's truth to this -- I've certainly seen over and over again how non-technical people often try to put people with technical skills in a box (as if we can't have other skills), and it also can be frustrating to watch people stake out some territory as where they add value when you know the activity they're engaged in isn't particularly difficult and they're not bringing outlier skills to it.

But one of the things I figured out a while back is that even jobs that aren't particularly hard sometimes still need dedicated time and attention. Division of labor can help with that. And if you try doing one of the "easy"/soft jobs for a while, you might find that it requires a certain set of subtle skills that don't all come naturally to you.

For example, I tried being an account/project manager and sometimes-front-end-dev for a startup years ago. And I found out really quick that the former is (partly) about paying attention to lots of little pieces of information and trying to push them between people quickly and managing human expectations and keeping everybody oriented around the important next step and a bunch of other things which didn't require years of study but still needed work. Development, by contrast, required a stacked set of skills in dealing with a cooperating set of abstractions and lots of time in singularly focused attention. Doing both at the same time is not something I'd recommend to most people, btw -- dev work is focus-driven, management work is interrupt driven and there's an inherent conflict. So... division of labor makes a lot of sense and you might need someone to do the things involved here to keep the enterprise going as much as you need developers. This stuff "actually matters" even when it isn't rocket science.

It also does happen that there are people who are outlier-good at "soft" tasks. Not as often as people claim, but it does happen.

> trying to hack other people to believe that their skills are what actually matters instead of hard skills ... it actually often works, which is sad.

If they're successful, isn't that more or less proof of the utility of those skills? Being able to persuade people to adopt a given point of view -- or least to be able to negotiate to an agreement -- strikes me as one of the most useful skills there could be. It's essentially hot-swapping code in someone else's brain! :)

I think what most of us technical folks get frustrated at is watching perceived value (and with it, authority and compensation) accumulate outside of our reach. But if this is a perception problem, perhaps the soft skill of persuasion is the answer.

Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

#53

Post by quotemstr »

rosser wrote: post #50
lhnz wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 some…

> if you're arguing against that, then you're part of the problem

That's in incredibly dangerous and irresponsible thing to write. We need to entertain all arguments, not enshrine some things in untouchable dogma. Calling people personally awful for stating an argument --- instead of addressing the argument --- is the reason that today's public discourse is bonkers.

The line I quoted above turns disagreement into a witch hunt.

Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

#54

Post by rosser »

quotemstr wrote: post #53
rosser wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 some…

> if you're arguing against that, then you're part of the problem That's in incredibly dangerous and irresponsible thing to write. We need to entertain all arguments, not enshrine some things in untouchable dogma. Calling people personally awful for stating an argument --- instead of addressing the argument --- is the reason that today's public discourse is bonkers. The line I quoted above turns disagreement into a w…

When "the problem" is over-valuing hard skills, and under-valuing soft skills, which is TFA's thesis (and mine, for purposes of this discussion), then it's rather less a "witch hunt" — which is speciously hyperbolic language in the first place, and the use of which, I submit, is far more contributory to the state of "discourse", such as it is.

I also, you'd do well to note, never called anyone "personally awful" (more specious hyperbole, hmm?). I said, paraphrased, that certain behaviors and positions are contributory to ("part of") "the problem", which we've already established is pretty narrowly defined.

Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

#55

Post by u801e »

adrianratnapala wrote: post #51
skybrian wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You have to see it from the inside to be sure that this (rather than some other pathology) is going on, so I will give an example from my own work. I wrote a design program for [thingys] that were basically rectangles, but could have circular arcs instead of straight line edges. A user could fake a circle using two semicircles joined by zero length edges. The PM saw this and wanted a circular [thingy] feature. He cou…

Your example reminds me of this video [1] that (humorously) goes over a similar mismatch problem.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

#56

Post by nostrademons »

skybrian wrote: post #39
bjourne wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yahoo? After Semel took over, they were explicitly organized as a media company, with a CEO who had deep experience in the media industry, managers coming from other media companies, and a sidelining of much of the original technical talent.

As a result, they completely missed that the continued growth of the Internet would make hand-curated approaches infeasible. And so they got their lunch eaten by Google. And then they started losing traffic on other properties to Google, who could leverage their massive technological infrastructure that Yahoo had largely copied and open-sourced but wasn't really integrating into their product design. Eventually they brought in an ex-Googler as CEO who tried to stem the tide and re-emphasize Yahoo's technical capabilities, but she was 10 years too late and fighting a whole culture by then.

Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

#57

Post by skybrian »

adrianratnapala wrote: post #51
skybrian wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You have to see it from the inside to be sure that this (rather than some other pathology) is going on, so I will give an example from my own work. I wrote a design program for [thingys] that were basically rectangles, but could have circular arcs instead of straight line edges. A user could fake a circle using two semicircles joined by zero length edges. The PM saw this and wanted a circular [thingy] feature. He cou…

I'm sure there's more to the story but it seems like there's a missing conversation here: "why don't we replace the fake circles with real circles?"

A healthy team would have that conversation. I'm not sure the PM needs to understand so much as defer to the engineering side if they decide a change is needed.

Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

#58

Post by lhnz »

rosser wrote: post #50
lhnz wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 some…

This 'brilliant technologist that is impossible to work with' mythos needs to die. The majority of us are normal people and don't deserve to be stereotyped in this way.

A broader, more liberal education isn't a waste, but I don't think that such a thing would lead anybody to call out nerds for social deficiencies while singing one's own praises. If it does, then yes, that is a shocking waste of an education.

Not being able to see this and trying to throw people under the bus with unfair stereotypes in order to get ahead is just as bad as having strong hard skills but being devoid of empathy. (It is practically a mirror image: having strong soft skills but being devoid of empathy.)

Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

#59

Post by rosser »

lhnz wrote: post #58
rosser wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 some…

This 'brilliant technologist that is impossible to work with' mythos needs to die. The majority of us are normal people and don't deserve to be stereotyped in this way. A broader, more liberal education isn't a waste, but I don't think that such a thing would lead anybody to call out nerds for social deficiencies while singing one's own praises. If it does, then yes, that is a shocking waste of an education. Not bein…

You're misconstruing my position. Yes, the rockstar asshole is rare, but I've worked with enough of them to know how destructive they are to the morale of the team. I was also once tasked with rewriting years of a rockstar asshole's code in months because said rockstar asshole left in a huff over not being treated the way he wanted, and no-one else had ever touched his deliberately impenetrable code. (All function and variable names were one or two letters, &c. But up until that point, he was just so productive, the employer put up with his behavior, and ignored the turnover on the rest of the team — which, miraculously, changed dramatically after he left. Go figure.)

So I'll freely own that I may have a small chip there. But at the same time, while the plural of anecdote isn't data, an existence proof is an existence proof.

Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

#60

Post by quotemstr »

rosser wrote: post #54
quotemstr wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you're arguing against that, then you're part of the problem That's in incredibly dangerous and irresponsible thing to write. We need to entertain all arguments, not enshrine some things in untouchable dogma. Calling people personally awful for stating an argument --- instead of addressing the argument --- is the reason that today's public discourse is bonkers. The line I quoted above turns disagreement into a w…

When "the problem" is over-valuing hard skills, and under-valuing soft skills, which is TFA's thesis (and mine, for purposes of this discussion), then it's rather less a "witch hunt" — which is speciously hyperbolic language in the first place, and the use of which, I submit, is far more contributory to the state of "discourse", such as it is. I also, you'd do well to note, never called anyone "personally awful" (mor…

No. You don't get to do that. You don't get to call people "the problem" just for making an argument. You don't get to just declare yourself the victor by impugning the character of your opponent. If this style of argumentation is what "soft skills" in tech means, we're heading to a dark place.
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