Hard and Soft Skills in Tech
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Hard and Soft Skills in Tech
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Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech
#2I 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.
Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech
#3While 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 a real risk of a "soft skills are real and important" position mutating into "if I don't like somebody it's just because they didn't work hard enough, not because there's anything strange about my expectations".
Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech
#4While 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.
Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech
#5Given 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 and will use it to enforce their agendas to detriment of most of us as we will be forced to spend our time on things we don't believe in and lie to each other we do meaningful things for betterment of humanity, which we won't. All large corps are becoming politically loaded places where one expression of "wrongthink" eclipses any achievements an individual did in the past, nuking future career. As sociopaths can't really compete on hard skills, they push soft-skill, touchy-feely agendas, identified as weak spots of techies that can't handle them reasonably in many cases. Oh, you achieved this awesome stuff that grew company by $100M? Well, you still don't smile at everyone, this fresh grad thinks you don't appreciate their Harvardness, please get better at this or no promotions/bonuses for you!
Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech
#6Given 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…
Tech is full of messy, untrustworthy and corrupt people. There was never lack of sociopaths or bad actors in tech, no less then anywhere else. We are however, fond of telling ourselves that we are better then everyone else.
Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech
#7tl; 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 with the outside world is a larger problem than the system itself [i.e. UX tougher than code]
4. Offers a metric to assess management by: if people dislike managers then those managers must have very low soft-skills. Proposes the traditional approach to management is a large failure in tech.
5. Describes soft-skills but gives no hard examples
6. Proposes creating vocabulary to represent soft skills such as requirement-gathering so that people can care more about these skills
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My aside: I think 1/2 largely depend on the product, some products are almost entirely technical (alpha go, bitcoin), we'll only ever reach agreement by not oversimplifying the question.
I agree on 4, but I really think 5 is crucial. I think everybody has a very different idea of what "Soft skills" are and how well other people think they do at those skills. For example, I think somebody who creates laughter at work is a huge asset, others may not.
Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech
#8Given 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…
Tech is full of messy, untrustworthy and corrupt people. There was never lack of sociopaths or bad actors in tech, no less then anywhere else. We are however, fond of telling ourselves that we are better then everyone else.
Sure, but our industry was never as corrupt as e.g. finances, doing back-channel financing of atrocities like wars/genocides, buying politicians to bypass popular sentiment, setting up drug distribution centers and prostitution rings nearby so that their employees can kill their inner humanity and have reward for corrupting themselves. My fear is that we are becoming the same and that change is happening right now.
Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech
#9Given 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…
Don't most people use tech to argue with each other on the Internet?
Re: Hard and Soft Skills in Tech
#10Given 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…
Don't most people use tech to argue with each other on the Internet?
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.