10 ms·

Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

121 points by pdevine 9y ago

bitL 9y ago
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 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!
- watwut 9y ago
  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.
  - bitL 9y ago
    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.
    - alexashka 9y ago
      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.
      - bitL 9y ago
        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 removing the need to use their platform at all and move it to a p2p blockchain instead. There are now options to (or at least try to) put an end to millenia of horrible human behavior.
        tbrownaw 9y ago
        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?
        bitL 9y ago
        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.
- abusoufiyan 9y ago
  Don't most people use tech to argue with each other on the Internet?
  - specializeded 9y ago
    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.
    - bitL 9y ago
      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 matters instead of hard skills coming from years of practice and suffering. It's like the oldest play in the book, divert attention from your own shortcoming and negate what is important. Due to "nerds being clueless", it actually often works, which is sad.
      - tbrownaw 9y ago
        Don't tell me you didn't notice people that lack skills needed for their jobs diverting their attention to their strong aspects ...you mean like pretending that only the easy stuff (interacting with the machine) matters, and all the complicated hard-to-understand things about interacting usefully with other humans are completely irrelevant? :) instead of hard skills coming from years of practice and suffering Um, no, the "hard" skills come from playing with the machine and solving puzzles for fun. They're not "hard" as in "not easy", it's as in "not fuzzy". Due to "nerds being clueless", it actually often works, which is sad. I do not appreciate your insults to my status as a competent adult. Are you sure you're as much on the side of the "nerds" as you pretend to be?
      - nostrademons 9y ago
- Judgmentality 9y ago
  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 (although I'd honestly be interested in hearing arguments against this). So if your goal is to keep them away, then just make sure to never monetize your product.
  - moduspol 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - bhl 9y ago
    Weirdly enough, I feel like saying the blame should not be put on the people for being assholes; assholery is not something people are born with. Rather, the type of environment is at fault for self-selecting for them.
- alexanderdmitri 9y ago
  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;
  - kenhwang 9y ago
    engineer w/only soft skills = management. Managers have their value too, but you can't only have managers.
    - ericd 9y ago
      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.
      - kenhwang 9y ago
        Preferring a manager with hard skills is like preferring an engineer with soft skills. It makes everything so much smoother. Similarly, I'd argue that a manager with only soft skills is as frustrating to work with as an engineer with only hard skills. They're functional, but it's not anywhere near ideal.
    - OceansOnPluto 9y ago
      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.
  - zunger 9y ago
    I disagree. An engineer with soft skills, but no hard skills, isn't an engineer – but their soft skills may be usable elsewhere. (I find that engineering managers need to have a decent amount of engineering skill to be at all effective) An engineer with hard skills, but no soft skills, is somewhere between unproductive and an active menace. The bare minimum soft skill is the ability to work effectively with others in a team. Someone who lacks this skill contributes more negative value, by harming the operation of the rest of the team, than any one person is able to create, no matter how good they are. And a system built by one person in angry isolation (which is where people quickly end up if they lack those skills) is a disaster from other perspectives: for example, production maintenance and operations, where ultimately only one person understands what they've built. An engineer with enough hard skills to function in a team, but only that, is a net positive, but I'd hesitate to describe them as "solid" – rather, I'd say that gets them to be an effective journeyman, but means they'll never be able to lead anything, even something small. Conversely, the "engineer" with lots of soft skills but minimal hard skills can be a manager – but not of anything too complex. Again, their career is permanently limited. So there's a real law of the minimum at play here. But notably, the place you drop to at zero soft skills is way worse than the place you drop to at zero hard skills. The latter, you can find a use for; the former, you need to get out of your organization as quickly as possible, because they do active damage every day.
alexandercrohde 9y ago
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 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 --- 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.
- et1337 9y ago
  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.
- zunger 9y ago
  On (2) -- I picked a personal anecdote, but I've seen this be very true on much smaller teams, as well. (Including, as it happens, AlphaGo! Think about what went in to creating the circumstances where it could be tested... they did some heroic labor) On (3) -- not just UX! Interaction with the outside world is a feature of every aspect of how people will use (or misuse) the system. (5) Totally agree that this is crucial. I did give a few examples (later in the article) but I think that coming up with a good taxonomy of these skills, and patterns for learning and teaching them, is a huge challenge going forward. Many intuitions are useful: for example, you note that some people want more laughter at work, others don't. A good leader should be able to make that meta-analysis, figure out what the team needs, and create that. But needs to do what? How do we describe the (positive) effects of laughter that you're trying to capture?
tome 9y ago
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.
- ionforce 9y ago
  Who do you think the author is trying to persuade and where did you detect disrespect?
  - tome 9y ago
    I suspect the author is trying to persuade those who make 'very anxious responses from people in tech at anything which suggests that their “core skills” may be devalued' and the reason I feel the tone is disrespectful is because he shows very little empathy for them. On the other hand, perhaps instead the point of the article is to reassure those with the soft skills that they will soon be more valuable than they currently are.
0xcde4c3db 9y ago
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 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".
- jschwartzi 9y ago
  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.
  - gt_ 9y ago
    Be careful with the term ‘empathy’. The contemporary use of this word (reflected in your definition) conflates a few different concepts in a potentially confusing manner. An ability to predict how others feel can be used, to put it simply, for both good and evil. A sociopath has high empathy. Do you want a sociopath as your manager? A better set of characteristics to look for might be: sympathy, compassion, consideration, honesty. ‘Empathy’ as a term actually has a shaky and very recent etymology which reflects some of the contradictions it plays into. A loose translation of it’s origins is to express sympathy, which has a slight technical from what it means now, because it has been widely adopted as dignified form of sympathy. The difference from the classical term sympathy is that empathy is more correlated with communication than intention. Why has it gained in popularity? A socio-cultural argument might center on the fact that empathy carries less vulnerability than sympathy. There are some serious implications here. The general problem with the focus on empathy is the loss of a bigger picture concern with being sincere. It’s analogous to short-term concerns vs. long-term concerns, where short-term concern is to provide immediate comfort and long-term concern is to provide sustainment and survival. A highly social workplace will value immediate social relations like expression of compassion while overlooking important long term values like honesty and less-empathetic forms of sympathy. Ideally, we would maintain both, but these simplifications of the issue are unlikely to support that outcome.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
draw_down 9y ago
Some people will construct elaborate reasoning for why they don't need to treat others with basic respect and dignity instead of just getting over themselves. When you find yourself saying, to yourself or others, "why should I have to...", consider that maybe you should just take the feedback and do what is being asked. On the other hand, part of the experience of the corporate workplace (in America at least) is being coerced into pretending that indignities inflicted by your superiors are actually good. So, you know. As usual we end up focusing on what workers need to do differently, but rarely on what bosses need to do or stop doing.
RoutinePlayer 9y ago
I wish the piece had been better edited to lead with a definitions of soft/hard skills, then a topic sentence for the thesis, then supporting arguments. There may be some good nuggets here, but it just feels like there's just rambling on and on.
quotemstr 9y ago
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 is that you really don't think that technical quality is important. In this case, you'll end up getting complacent on quality, ship crap, and open yourself up to competition. You'll be in good company if you go this route: it's part of the reason big companies inevitably decay and get outcompeted by smaller, newer ones. (Notice how a lot of this "soft skills only" crap comes from big companies with products having enough inertia to last a while at a low quality level?) The other interpretation is most insidious: you do recognize that technical excellence matters, but want to redirect credit to non-technical managers. This phenomenon is a huge problem outside tech; it goes back at least as far as Edison. We shouldn't be in a hurry to import this problem into our own field. 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.
- skybrian 9y ago
  Who is arguing for "soft skills only"? Haven't seen that so far.
- tbrownaw 9y ago
  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 thing is. 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.
  - lliamander 9y ago
KKKKkkkk1 9y ago
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?
- skybrian 9y ago
  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.
- alexandercrohde 9y ago
  I think this is a fair question because you sincerely are asking. I think you have to admit that a manager who can make the team care about work, enjoy it, feel like a team, feel like they're working on an important problem together (even though none of this emotional stuff is objectively true/false or valid/invalid) is an asset to the company.
- zunger 9y ago
  No no, not at all! One of the key things a manager needs to do is create a culture of mutual respect within the team, between everyone and everyone else. If the manager doesn't actually respect people, that's going to be a disaster. This is tied to one of the core categories of soft skills: getting a group of people to work together as a team and trust each other.
heeton 9y ago
I’ve stopped calling these “soft” skills, especially when hiring in the last year. They’re anything but soft, and no less important to a team.
- emmelaich 9y ago
  I've seen that argument before and I don't think it is helpful. You're associating the word soft with easy and hard with difficult -- which is part of the problem. Soft skills are difficult for many.
  - heeton 9y ago
    I don’t associate hard/soft with difficult like that (I personally find soft skills difficult), but this is a good example of how the terms are ripe for misunderstanding. I try to use communication or personal or interpersonal skills, etc.
spraak 9y ago
This post is great for raising awareness but no real solutions offered, besides "there must be training".
- XnoiVeX 9y ago
  Absolutely. I was looking for the ending and it never came. Feel like I wasted 10 mins of my life.
hyperion2010 9y ago
I think it is time to post a link to The Night Watch again.... [0] 0. http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/thenightwatch.pdf http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/thenightwatch...
mannykannot 9y ago
Is sound engineering judgement a technical skill or a soft skill? How about the ability to articulate that judgement, so as to explain to others that one set of choices is better than the alternatives, and persuade them to agree?
- zunger 9y ago
  Yes. :) Sound engineering judgment typically implies a good understanding of the full context of the problem ("is this a good tradeoff?"), which often involves things beyond the merely technical. And without all of the other things you mention, which are definitely in the category normally called "soft skills," the best engineering judgment in the world will go to waste.
emmelaich 9y ago
> The fact is that the kinds of “soft skills” we’re talking about aren’t the ones that come for free to anybody I wish that a certain ex-Googler could have been educated in these skills rather than being shown the door.
- Viliam1234 9y ago
  I imagine that the people who fired him are congratulating themselves on having great soft skills and making everyone feel safe.

121 points by pdevine 9y ago

bitL 9y ago

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 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!

watwut 9y ago
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.
- bitL 9y ago
  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.
  - alexashka 9y ago
    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.
    - bitL 9y ago
      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 removing the need to use their platform at all and move it to a p2p blockchain instead. There are now options to (or at least try to) put an end to millenia of horrible human behavior.
      - tbrownaw 9y ago
        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?
        bitL 9y ago
        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.
abusoufiyan 9y ago
Don't most people use tech to argue with each other on the Internet?
- specializeded 9y ago
  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.
  - bitL 9y ago
    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 matters instead of hard skills coming from years of practice and suffering. It's like the oldest play in the book, divert attention from your own shortcoming and negate what is important. Due to "nerds being clueless", it actually often works, which is sad.
    - tbrownaw 9y ago
      Don't tell me you didn't notice people that lack skills needed for their jobs diverting their attention to their strong aspects ...you mean like pretending that only the easy stuff (interacting with the machine) matters, and all the complicated hard-to-understand things about interacting usefully with other humans are completely irrelevant? :) instead of hard skills coming from years of practice and suffering Um, no, the "hard" skills come from playing with the machine and solving puzzles for fun. They're not "hard" as in "not easy", it's as in "not fuzzy". Due to "nerds being clueless", it actually often works, which is sad. I do not appreciate your insults to my status as a competent adult. Are you sure you're as much on the side of the "nerds" as you pretend to be?
    - nostrademons 9y ago
Judgmentality 9y ago
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 (although I'd honestly be interested in hearing arguments against this). So if your goal is to keep them away, then just make sure to never monetize your product.
- moduspol 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    [deleted]
- bhl 9y ago
  Weirdly enough, I feel like saying the blame should not be put on the people for being assholes; assholery is not something people are born with. Rather, the type of environment is at fault for self-selecting for them.
alexanderdmitri 9y ago
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;
- kenhwang 9y ago
  engineer w/only soft skills = management. Managers have their value too, but you can't only have managers.
  - ericd 9y ago
    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.
    - kenhwang 9y ago
      Preferring a manager with hard skills is like preferring an engineer with soft skills. It makes everything so much smoother. Similarly, I'd argue that a manager with only soft skills is as frustrating to work with as an engineer with only hard skills. They're functional, but it's not anywhere near ideal.
  - OceansOnPluto 9y ago
    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.
- zunger 9y ago
  I disagree. An engineer with soft skills, but no hard skills, isn't an engineer – but their soft skills may be usable elsewhere. (I find that engineering managers need to have a decent amount of engineering skill to be at all effective) An engineer with hard skills, but no soft skills, is somewhere between unproductive and an active menace. The bare minimum soft skill is the ability to work effectively with others in a team. Someone who lacks this skill contributes more negative value, by harming the operation of the rest of the team, than any one person is able to create, no matter how good they are. And a system built by one person in angry isolation (which is where people quickly end up if they lack those skills) is a disaster from other perspectives: for example, production maintenance and operations, where ultimately only one person understands what they've built. An engineer with enough hard skills to function in a team, but only that, is a net positive, but I'd hesitate to describe them as "solid" – rather, I'd say that gets them to be an effective journeyman, but means they'll never be able to lead anything, even something small. Conversely, the "engineer" with lots of soft skills but minimal hard skills can be a manager – but not of anything too complex. Again, their career is permanently limited. So there's a real law of the minimum at play here. But notably, the place you drop to at zero soft skills is way worse than the place you drop to at zero hard skills. The latter, you can find a use for; the former, you need to get out of your organization as quickly as possible, because they do active damage every day.

alexandercrohde 9y ago

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 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 --- 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.

et1337 9y ago
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.
zunger 9y ago
On (2) -- I picked a personal anecdote, but I've seen this be very true on much smaller teams, as well. (Including, as it happens, AlphaGo! Think about what went in to creating the circumstances where it could be tested... they did some heroic labor) On (3) -- not just UX! Interaction with the outside world is a feature of every aspect of how people will use (or misuse) the system. (5) Totally agree that this is crucial. I did give a few examples (later in the article) but I think that coming up with a good taxonomy of these skills, and patterns for learning and teaching them, is a huge challenge going forward. Many intuitions are useful: for example, you note that some people want more laughter at work, others don't. A good leader should be able to make that meta-analysis, figure out what the team needs, and create that. But needs to do what? How do we describe the (positive) effects of laughter that you're trying to capture?

tome 9y ago

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.

ionforce 9y ago
Who do you think the author is trying to persuade and where did you detect disrespect?
- tome 9y ago
  I suspect the author is trying to persuade those who make 'very anxious responses from people in tech at anything which suggests that their “core skills” may be devalued' and the reason I feel the tone is disrespectful is because he shows very little empathy for them. On the other hand, perhaps instead the point of the article is to reassure those with the soft skills that they will soon be more valuable than they currently are.

0xcde4c3db 9y ago

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 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".

jschwartzi 9y ago
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.
- gt_ 9y ago
  Be careful with the term ‘empathy’. The contemporary use of this word (reflected in your definition) conflates a few different concepts in a potentially confusing manner. An ability to predict how others feel can be used, to put it simply, for both good and evil. A sociopath has high empathy. Do you want a sociopath as your manager? A better set of characteristics to look for might be: sympathy, compassion, consideration, honesty. ‘Empathy’ as a term actually has a shaky and very recent etymology which reflects some of the contradictions it plays into. A loose translation of it’s origins is to express sympathy, which has a slight technical from what it means now, because it has been widely adopted as dignified form of sympathy. The difference from the classical term sympathy is that empathy is more correlated with communication than intention. Why has it gained in popularity? A socio-cultural argument might center on the fact that empathy carries less vulnerability than sympathy. There are some serious implications here. The general problem with the focus on empathy is the loss of a bigger picture concern with being sincere. It’s analogous to short-term concerns vs. long-term concerns, where short-term concern is to provide immediate comfort and long-term concern is to provide sustainment and survival. A highly social workplace will value immediate social relations like expression of compassion while overlooking important long term values like honesty and less-empathetic forms of sympathy. Ideally, we would maintain both, but these simplifications of the issue are unlikely to support that outcome.

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draw_down 9y ago

Some people will construct elaborate reasoning for why they don't need to treat others with basic respect and dignity instead of just getting over themselves. When you find yourself saying, to yourself or others, "why should I have to...", consider that maybe you should just take the feedback and do what is being asked. On the other hand, part of the experience of the corporate workplace (in America at least) is being coerced into pretending that indignities inflicted by your superiors are actually good. So, you know. As usual we end up focusing on what workers need to do differently, but rarely on what bosses need to do or stop doing.

RoutinePlayer 9y ago

I wish the piece had been better edited to lead with a definitions of soft/hard skills, then a topic sentence for the thesis, then supporting arguments. There may be some good nuggets here, but it just feels like there's just rambling on and on.

quotemstr 9y ago

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 is that you really don't think that technical quality is important. In this case, you'll end up getting complacent on quality, ship crap, and open yourself up to competition. You'll be in good company if you go this route: it's part of the reason big companies inevitably decay and get outcompeted by smaller, newer ones. (Notice how a lot of this "soft skills only" crap comes from big companies with products having enough inertia to last a while at a low quality level?) The other interpretation is most insidious: you do recognize that technical excellence matters, but want to redirect credit to non-technical managers. This phenomenon is a huge problem outside tech; it goes back at least as far as Edison. We shouldn't be in a hurry to import this problem into our own field. 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.

skybrian 9y ago
Who is arguing for "soft skills only"? Haven't seen that so far.
tbrownaw 9y ago
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 thing is. 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.
- lliamander 9y ago

KKKKkkkk1 9y ago

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?

skybrian 9y ago
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.
alexandercrohde 9y ago
I think this is a fair question because you sincerely are asking. I think you have to admit that a manager who can make the team care about work, enjoy it, feel like a team, feel like they're working on an important problem together (even though none of this emotional stuff is objectively true/false or valid/invalid) is an asset to the company.
zunger 9y ago
No no, not at all! One of the key things a manager needs to do is create a culture of mutual respect within the team, between everyone and everyone else. If the manager doesn't actually respect people, that's going to be a disaster. This is tied to one of the core categories of soft skills: getting a group of people to work together as a team and trust each other.

heeton 9y ago

I’ve stopped calling these “soft” skills, especially when hiring in the last year. They’re anything but soft, and no less important to a team.

emmelaich 9y ago
I've seen that argument before and I don't think it is helpful. You're associating the word soft with easy and hard with difficult -- which is part of the problem. Soft skills are difficult for many.
- heeton 9y ago
  I don’t associate hard/soft with difficult like that (I personally find soft skills difficult), but this is a good example of how the terms are ripe for misunderstanding. I try to use communication or personal or interpersonal skills, etc.

spraak 9y ago

This post is great for raising awareness but no real solutions offered, besides "there must be training".

XnoiVeX 9y ago
Absolutely. I was looking for the ending and it never came. Feel like I wasted 10 mins of my life.

hyperion2010 9y ago

I think it is time to post a link to The Night Watch again.... [0] 0. http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/thenightwatch.pdf http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/thenightwatch...

mannykannot 9y ago

Is sound engineering judgement a technical skill or a soft skill? How about the ability to articulate that judgement, so as to explain to others that one set of choices is better than the alternatives, and persuade them to agree?

zunger 9y ago
Yes. :) Sound engineering judgment typically implies a good understanding of the full context of the problem ("is this a good tradeoff?"), which often involves things beyond the merely technical. And without all of the other things you mention, which are definitely in the category normally called "soft skills," the best engineering judgment in the world will go to waste.

emmelaich 9y ago

> The fact is that the kinds of “soft skills” we’re talking about aren’t the ones that come for free to anybody I wish that a certain ex-Googler could have been educated in these skills rather than being shown the door.

Viliam1234 9y ago
I imagine that the people who fired him are congratulating themselves on having great soft skills and making everyone feel safe.