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

Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 117 posts

Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

#61

Post by adrianratnapala »

skybrian wrote: post #57
adrianratnapala wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We'd had that conversation [1]; and (we thought) the answer was that real circles were not worth the extra complexity, especially since common use-cases could be covered by fake circles. Or at least we thought we'd had that conversation, but it turns out moot if the PM can't retain in is mind, the difference between fake and real circles.

I don't think deference to engineers is useful in this sort of thing. There is a class of people (PMs) who have the hard job of aligning user expectations with the engineered reality. They do this by guiding both the customers and engineers, and to do that, they must understand the real landscape they are guiding people through.

[1] I don't want to imply here that everything was the fault of the PM, it wasn't. But there was definately a class bad things that happened due to this particular kind of non-technical thinking.

Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

#63

Post by lhnz »

rosser wrote: post #59
lhnz wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

I don't think we disagree but I do think you're absolving the sins of social assholes because of the sins of asocial assholes.

I've met rockstar asshole programmer's before, but I think it is overblown -- I do not think there are as many as everybody thinks there are. Far more often I've met great engineers that were well-rounded, kind and decent people. And yet the myth persists...

Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

#64

Post by PoachedSausage »

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…

The problem we have is that fewer and fewer people are choosing to pursue hard engineering skills, partly because they're, well, hard and partly because soft skills seem to provide an equal or better living. I have nothing against philosophers, musicians and poets, I spent most of today being entertained by them on the radio, but without the hard skills the comforts of civilisation like running water, electricity and internet will disappear.

Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

#65

Post by ericd »

kenhwang wrote: post #45
alexanderdmitri wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd infinitely prefer a manager with at least some hard skills than one with none. My most frustrating managers were the ones you describe, because they just weren't at all qualified to make decisions about what we were doing. I don't think I'm alone among engineers in that opinion.

Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

#66

Post by OceansOnPluto »

kenhwang wrote: post #45
alexanderdmitri wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Completely agree, and I'd posit that if you have you never faced a manager with ONLY hard skills and no soft skills, you're lucky. They're miserable to work for. I worked for one who was promoted because he was really, really good at ServiceNow (the service du jour of our company), and he literally thought management was threatening people until he got his way....

...until he was forced out when none of the departments succeeded, that is.

Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

#67

Post by rosser »

lhnz wrote: post #63
rosser wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

I don't think we disagree but I do think you're absolving the sins of social assholes because of the sins of asocial assholes. I've met rockstar asshole programmer's before, but I think it is overblown -- I do not think there are as many as everybody thinks there are. Far more often I've met great engineers that were well-rounded, kind and decent people. And yet the myth persists...

I'm not absolving anyone of anything, and I'm curious what I might have said to suggest I am. I've met far more, as you say, "social assholes", and been thrown under buses by them far more often than by technical folk, of whatever caliber socialization they had to offer.

Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

#68

Post by lliamander »

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 may agree with your general sentiment, but I think the OP actually avoids the specific mistake that you are criticizing. Let me highlight a few key quotes:

> There always remain various hard [technical problems], of course, which are critical and which can’t be solved by any number of inexperienced people except by them getting experience; that’s why we need to continue to build and grow our technical skills. But if you continue to grow your skillset, you’ll quickly discover that the amount of time that needs to be spent on these extremely difficult technical problems tends towards significantly less than a full-time job; instead, the crucial (and incredibly hard) problems that affect a system have more to do with how that system interacts with the outside world — which is, more and more, people.

> Interestingly, there’s a lot more crossover between hard and soft skills than many people realize: when you start to see your system as a component of a larger system which includes humans as elements, and you start to ask how humans interact with each other and what their behaviors are, then many of the same “hard skills” systems design approaches not only make sense, but can provide even better answers to traditionally purely “soft” questions.

Eric Raymond said something similar recently[0]:

> Whole-systems engineering, when you get good at it, goes beyond being entirely or even mostly about technical optimizations. Every artifact we make is situated in a context of human action that widens out to the economics of its use, the sociology of its users, and the entirety of what Austrian economists call “praxeology”, the science of purposeful human behavior in its widest scope.

Also see Pieter Hintjens' book _Social Architecture_[1].

This is a sensitive issue, because it comes down to the question of who is at the top of the hierarchy, and it's part of human nature to be highly sensitive to our relative position within a given hierarchy. For those of us who have technical skills and an analytical temperament, we naturally want to be in an environment where those qualities are most advantageous in moving up the hierarchy.

I think Zunger's point is that, even within such an organization, there certain skills (which are not specifically technical) which are necessary to being maximally effective at the top of the hierarchy.

[0] http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7745

[1] https://www.gitbook.com/book/hintjens/social-architecture/de...

Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

#69

Post by lliamander »

tbrownaw wrote: post #29
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…

The truth is that in our field, there's a wide distribution of skill levels, and some technical problems go from "impossible" to "routine" once your technical people pass a certain skill and quality bar. Soft skills do not get you over this quality bar. Actual technical knowledge does. Yes, hard technical skills are absolutely necessary for "building the thing right". The necessary level of skill depends on what that…

> But there's also "building the right thing", and that is a completely different set of skills. Many of which get lumped into the "soft skills" bucket.

Actually, I think Zunger makes the explicit point that they are not completely different skill sets. I'm inclined to agree with him.

Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

#70

Post by bjourne »

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?

In this context, "not technical enough" means "not being able to accurately estimate technical costs." I posit that there is a correlation between being technical and being able to estimate technical costs:

One example I have seen a lot is the "exactly as I want it" design. What that means is foregoing using any standard web components (like Bootstrap, jqueryUI, ...) because they don't work exactly as the product designer wants, so you have to build something from scratch. Then you run out of time because building a complex web site without relying on any ready-made components is a lot of work, leaving the web site in a decidedly half-assed state.

As you can see, in my opinion "being technical" is not only about programming. It is also about YAGNI, being lazy and very much being a realistic pessimist.

Post reply on HN