I kept trying to figure out if this was a deliberate joke. The author sets out to be contrarian with this thesis statement: Communication skills are completel

I kept trying to figure out if this was a deliberate joke. The author sets out to be contrarian with this thesis statement: Communication skills are completely and utterly overrated for the position of software developer. Then the essay goes on to eloquently argue the opposite, complete with quotes from Steve Yegge and Jeff Atwood as well as Diana Larson of 37signals, and with a fairly decent five-point argument in favor of communication skills. All of which takes up most of the post. The impression is that of an author who is desperately at war with his own subconscious mind. It's like watching Doctor Strangelove write a blog post: The author occasionally has to seize his right hand with his left in order to stop it from undermining his stated goals. Anyway, just in case this isn't all tongue-in-cheek: Yes, it's true that you also need to know programming as well as communication to be a good programmer, just as a good runner needs a right leg as well as a left one. But there are good reasons why communication is often prized as highly, or higher. The essay offers several; here are two more. First, a great programmer who cannot communicate cannot argue with you. You'll tell him to build X, and with his brilliant insight he'll know that X is the wrong thing and that he should really build Y, but he's not verbally facile enough to win an argument with you so he'll either go off and build a beautifully optimized version of the wrong thing, or he'll sit around sulking until you finally figure out, weeks later, that his mumblings about Y were actually a stroke of genius. Either way, you waste time and money. A more serious problem is this: The great programmer who cannot communicate will build you a fast, well-designed, robust piece of software that is almost entirely opaque. When you ask the other workers on your team to maintain that software, they will come back to you two weeks later with the news that they just can't understand it, that the Silent Genius can't or won't explain it to them, and that your company therefore has no choice but to throw it all away and rebuild it in Enterprise Java. This is a huge problem that happens time and again. Even hiring a brilliant communicator can't always save you -- PG can write and argue, and yet Yahoo rewrote his Lisp software anyway -- but at least it gives you a fighting chance. Software is the art of building a structure inside your own head. (The computer is just an accessory.) But professional software engineering is the art of pinning that structure down, making it work, and keeping it working independently of you and your head, because your brain doesn't scale. And the latter task is all about communication.