"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

"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." - Eric s. Raymond I would agree that building a highly-technical piece of infrastructure will require a different skill set than building an enterprise-y "forms and reports" style application. But if you're going to give someone the latitude to decide what kinds of problems they are going to solve (an not merely the latitude on how to solve it) you are going to want some communication skills and some awareness of how those problems relate to the overall goals of the business. Now I tend to think that even in these higher level positions, technical skill still matters a lot. Architecture Astronauts are a plague and can create unnecessarily complex problems that the senior grunts have to deal with. However, the importance of "soft skills" does grow as one move's up the ranks. For me, the biggest take-away was that the CTO had failed to cultivate talented employees for promotion.