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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

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
  > 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.
bjourne 9y ago
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 often than not just leads to badly designed products.
- skybrian 9y ago
  What's an example of a product that was badly designed because the product designer wasn't technical enough?
  - nostrademons 9y ago
    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.
  - adrianratnapala 9y ago
    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.
newman8r 9y ago
I also feel like this particular article fails to address the intrapersonal aspects of 'soft skills' and mostly considers the interpersonal issues.
rosser 9y ago
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're part of the problem. It's also what we call a "false dilemma" to suggest that your proffered interpretations for this "trend" are the only interpretations for it.
- lhnz 9y ago
  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
  - rosser 9y ago
    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."
aalleavitch 9y ago
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.
lliamander 9y ago
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 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7745 [1] https://www.gitbook.com/book/hintjens/social-architecture/details https://www.gitbook.com/book/hintjens/social-architecture/de...
john_moscow 9y ago
>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. I would dare say this mechanism has been in trouble for the past decade or so and that's the root of the problem. If you're a large company with a sizable share in an established market, technical quality becomes secondary. It's customers' habits, compatibility and your sales budget that run the show. Until the market turns and you go bust, of course. If you're quickly growing startup, the budget you can spend on growth (i.e. the amount you can raise) far outweighs the technical side. Efficiency? Investors don't care about that, they care about you making enough buzz and getting acquired (or IPOing) while you're still hot. They will get a return even if you never had a single profitable quarter. Unfortunately, as much as we technical people hate this, I don't see any reason for the "IQ -> EQ" trend to be reversed anytime soon. Not in the current market. The only way out of this circus is making your own bootstrapped business.
jondubois 9y ago
Some of the best developers I know have bad soft skills and they have had trouble holding onto a steady job because of it. Being fired often makes them more bitter, less trusting and further damages their soft skills which turns into a vicious cycle. Part of the problem is the increased intolerance to conflict in the workplace. Employees these days get fired for merely having self-respect and conviction.

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
> 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.

bjourne 9y ago

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 often than not just leads to badly designed products.

skybrian 9y ago
What's an example of a product that was badly designed because the product designer wasn't technical enough?
- nostrademons 9y ago
  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.
- adrianratnapala 9y ago
  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.

newman8r 9y ago

I also feel like this particular article fails to address the intrapersonal aspects of 'soft skills' and mostly considers the interpersonal issues.

rosser 9y ago

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're part of the problem. It's also what we call a "false dilemma" to suggest that your proffered interpretations for this "trend" are the only interpretations for it.

lhnz 9y ago
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
- rosser 9y ago
  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."

aalleavitch 9y ago

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.

lliamander 9y ago

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 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7745 [1] https://www.gitbook.com/book/hintjens/social-architecture/details https://www.gitbook.com/book/hintjens/social-architecture/de...

john_moscow 9y ago

>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. I would dare say this mechanism has been in trouble for the past decade or so and that's the root of the problem. If you're a large company with a sizable share in an established market, technical quality becomes secondary. It's customers' habits, compatibility and your sales budget that run the show. Until the market turns and you go bust, of course. If you're quickly growing startup, the budget you can spend on growth (i.e. the amount you can raise) far outweighs the technical side. Efficiency? Investors don't care about that, they care about you making enough buzz and getting acquired (or IPOing) while you're still hot. They will get a return even if you never had a single profitable quarter. Unfortunately, as much as we technical people hate this, I don't see any reason for the "IQ -> EQ" trend to be reversed anytime soon. Not in the current market. The only way out of this circus is making your own bootstrapped business.

jondubois 9y ago

Some of the best developers I know have bad soft skills and they have had trouble holding onto a steady job because of it. Being fired often makes them more bitter, less trusting and further damages their soft skills which turns into a vicious cycle. Part of the problem is the increased intolerance to conflict in the workplace. Employees these days get fired for merely having self-respect and conviction.