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The bullet points in the article are reasonable enough, but almost every explanation is questionable. I’ll just address one. Soft skills are indeed very import

The bullet points in the article are reasonable enough, but almost every explanation is questionable. I’ll just address one. Soft skills are indeed very important, and sometimes more so than technical skills. However: > Technical skills are the ones you can learn easily. With different projects, you can understand a particular programming language. You can learn its syntax, pros and cons. It's just a matter of practice. Technical skills are not just about programming language syntax. I wonder how long the author’s been in the industry (apparently “a lot of years”) or how narrow his role is, that he’s never had to learn completely new concepts or paradigms. And even the soft skills section is bizarre. What can I learn about utilizing my soft skills from the author’s list of all the times they thought a colleague was unhelpful or “toxic”? Weird article.

demondemidi 3y ago
I’d say OP has 5-7 years. Because if you have both soft and technical skills together you stop writing code after about your first decade and start solving much larger problems.
- davewritescode 3y ago
  This is bad advice in many organizations. The best architects I've ever worked with were excellent coders and kept up to date with everything even if only 10% of their role involved writing actual code. It's very hard to be a technical leader without credibility.
atq2119 3y ago
Indeed, I see a big difference between developers in my team based on their general reasoning and discrete math skills. How capable are they of abstractly interpreting code in their head? Are they used to thinking about how to prove something is correct? Are they used to thinking in terms of graphs? That sort of thing. Those are technical skills that seem pretty difficult to learn.
charles_f 3y ago
> I wonder how long the author’s been in the industry (apparently “a lot of years”) 8y, most likely including internship. His resume is on the blog. I wondered as well and checked.

demondemidi 3y ago

I’d say OP has 5-7 years. Because if you have both soft and technical skills together you stop writing code after about your first decade and start solving much larger problems.

davewritescode 3y ago
This is bad advice in many organizations. The best architects I've ever worked with were excellent coders and kept up to date with everything even if only 10% of their role involved writing actual code. It's very hard to be a technical leader without credibility.

atq2119 3y ago

Indeed, I see a big difference between developers in my team based on their general reasoning and discrete math skills. How capable are they of abstractly interpreting code in their head? Are they used to thinking about how to prove something is correct? Are they used to thinking in terms of graphs? That sort of thing. Those are technical skills that seem pretty difficult to learn.

charles_f 3y ago

> I wonder how long the author’s been in the industry (apparently “a lot of years”) 8y, most likely including internship. His resume is on the blog. I wondered as well and checked.