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I don't think it has ever been the case that you could neglect soft skills. You will hear this over and over, in every area of every business: people become suc

I don't think it has ever been the case that you could neglect soft skills. You will hear this over and over, in every area of every business: people become successful by adjusting their behaviour to what works for the business. Sometimes this is called being a slick politician, sometimes it is called avoiding getting bogged down in politics. But it's never been the case that a dev could just focus on technical things and not spend any time figuring out the context they are working in, and behaving accordingly. My first day of work, this is what my boss said to me: "Look at this trading floor. There's screens everywhere, everything is numbers. Deltas, gammas, vegas. Everything is calculated by computers. But don't forget, every business is a people business!"

MattGaiser 9mo ago
There are plenty of devs who do nothing beyond taking a Jira ticket scoped by others, implementing it, and then grabbing the next ticket. While they may not have been very successful, they did have a place.
- verelo 9mo ago
  You’re right but i have always preferred people who can do a little more. Nothing against the socially awkward and conflict avoidant nature in many of these friends, but people who push back and fight to communicate their views and passions often got our team better outcomes than someone who just turns up and does the work they’re asked to do.
  - PunchyHamster 9mo ago
    As long as it is not opposite set of skills (talks a lot without knowledge to back it up so essentially using charisma to convince people to do the wrong thing most of the time) then yes, a lil bit of negotiation can save you a whole lot of work in the long run (XY problems being one example)
    - verelo 9mo ago
      For sure, I’ve been tricked into hiring those people before too. It’s good that there’s still something hard in running an organization, the whole “what is value?” question feels like it’ll be one of the few things we have to maintain work for humans over the next little while.
- miav 9mo ago
  Is this genuinely common? I’ve only ever seen that level of hand holding extended to new grad hires.
  - kube-system 9mo ago
    It definitely happens at bloated organizations that aren’t really good at software development. I think it is especially more common in organizations where software is a cost center and business rules involve a specialized discipline that software developers wouldn’t typically have expertise in.
  - veyh 9mo ago
    I have 13 years of professional experience, and I work in a small company (15 people). Apart from one or two weekly meetings, I mostly just work on stuff independently. I'm the solo developer for a number of projects ranging from embedded microcontrollers to distributed backend systems. There's very little handholding; it's more like requirements come in, and results come out. I have been part of some social circles before but they were always centered around a common activity like a game, and once that activity went away, so did those connections. As I started working on side hustles, it occurred to me that not having any kind of social network (not even social media accounts) may have added an additional level of difficulty. I am still working on the side hustles, though.
    - nuancebydefault 9mo ago
      > it's more like requirements come in, and results come out. Wow someone is very good at setting requirements. I have never seen that in 25 years of dev life.
      - veyh 9mo ago
        Of course, sometimes people realize that what they asked for wasn't actually what was needed.
        pmg101 9mo ago
- sbrother 9mo ago
  I've heard this, and I've even seen it in plenty of poorly performing businesses, but I've never actually seen it in a highly performing, profitable tech company. Other than at the new grad level but it's treated as net-negative training while they learn how to build consensus and scope out work. Not coincidentally, the places I've seen this approach to work are the same places that have hired me as a consultant to bring an effective team to build something high priority or fix a dumpster fire.
  - tikhonj 9mo ago
    A lot of highly performing teams don't even use tickets.
    - win311fwg 9mo ago
      Do any highly performing teams use tickets? A fly-by-night charlatan successfully pushed ticking into our organization in the past year and I would say it was a disaster. I only have the experience of one, but from that experience I am now not sure you can even build good software that way. I originally hoped it was growing pains, but I see more and more fundamental flaws.
      - yurishimo 9mo ago
        I’ve worked at one, but it required a PM who was ruthless about cutting scope and we focused on user stories after establishing a strong feedback pipeline, both technically through CI/CD/tests and with stakeholders. Looking back, that was the best team I’ve ever worked in. We split up to separate corners of the company once the project was delivered (12 month buildout of an alpha that was internally tested and then fleshed out). Maybe I had greenfield glasses but I came in for the last 3 months and it was still humming.
      - layer8 9mo ago
        How do you keep track of tasks that need to be done, of reported bugs and feature requests?
- pjmlp 9mo ago
  Looks very robotic to me, never worked on a place where meetings and dealing with other humans wasn't part of the job.
  - Retric 9mo ago
    I’ve been on plenty of teams where meetings didn’t actually require any meaningful participation from most people.
    - pjmlp 9mo ago
      Never been the case for me, additionally I have always worked in shared desks or offices.
    - nuancebydefault 9mo ago
      Meetings without any meaningful participation from most people? I guess too many people in the meetings?
      - win311fwg 9mo ago
        That is likely referring to what has become known as the standup, where developers read off the commit log for the "manager" who hasn't yet figured out how to use a computer.
        whstl 9mo ago
        Or for the product manager too lazy to check Jira.
- falloutx 9mo ago
  People gotta remember its a job just like anything else. I dont see any other profession going above and beyond so why should that be levied upon on programmers, I don't see PMs trying to understand code, CEOs trying to understand the customer more than the investor.
cyanydeez 9mo ago
Often it means being a sociopath
straydusk 9mo ago
There are HOSTS of dogshit devs that operated that way, trust me. Half the job of a PM has been to work with these types of people.
- awesome_dude 9mo ago
  That really sounds like a PM complaining that "I have to do my actual job of being the bridge between the business and the engineering team" ALL PMs are expected to be doing some translation, otherwise what's the point of their job?
  - 9rx 9mo ago
    > otherwise what's the point of their job? Who else is going to move a box from one column to another?
    - steve1977 9mo ago
      Claude?
      - 9rx 9mo ago
        It could be Claude. Or Sally, Joe, or Sue. Whatever name the PM goes by is immaterial.
- epolanski 9mo ago
  I too met many such developers. Very often some tech lead or head of could spot them and put them on tasks where they could be autonomous (generally technical but important aspects that bogs down several teams or products: pipelines, tooling, api design, performance, etc). Some could also be involved in features involving business logic but the lead/PM would make sure to put more details or streamline any feedback/questions through jira. Also, there's even more developers out there that get complacent on the business aspect after some time of seeing how poor product and business development is, and just phase out of it completely and try to find solace in the technicalities. If feels sometimes like many on HN live in ultra competitive bubbles with managers pushing people to grow and promote them like it works in Meta and similar, but that's really not the norm, it's the exception. Many of us work in companies where software is an expense, not an asset, mentality is different, there are no such structures, management and product are crap and you find a wide variety of situations and devs.
themafia 9mo ago
It's the vibe coders who would love to pretend that the opposite end of the spectrum from them is "artisinal coding." They honestly have no idea what "software engineering" in a professional context even looks like. So they come up with this prattle.
- Eisenstein 9mo ago
  Blaming people who use technology to make a valuable process accessible to themselves and then invoking a a no-true-Scotsman in order to defend the status quo is a good example of a lack of soft skills.
  - JohnLeitch 9mo ago
    But the process is still inaccessible to them, provided we consider achieving reliability and security goals of said process. And no, this is not "no true Scotsman;" "vibe coded" software is demonstrably inferior in numerous ways, and outright dangerous in some contexts. No number of carefully scripted demos or PR campaigns is going to change this reality.
    - ethbr1 9mo ago
      The joke about vibe coding replacing junior devs is apt, because it has the same failure mode -- it can build something that works, but completely incompetently and with unmaintainable design choices. Consequently, this was the reason businesses had junior devs partnered with senior devs! It's not surprising that when you pair junior devs (human) with junior devs (gen ai coding) you still get junior dev issues. Personally, I think AI coding tools being able to translate incomplete junior dev thinking into senior dev work is an impossible task. There's just not enough initial intent signal in the novel task use case (read non-'CRUD LOB app'). I do think eventually we'll have complementary expert tools that perform a senior dev-alike function (arch and security review), but that's a harder problem that likely isn't going to be economically viable as a product until/unless AI coding tools achieve substantial penetration.
  - sillywabbit 9mo ago
luckylion 9mo ago
It depends on what you want to achieve as a developer, I think. Having some soft skills makes a lot of things easier, but if you don't have the hard skills to back it up, you'll plateau unless you switch to management before you reach your limit. At the same time, if you're very good at what you do, soft skills are a lot less important. Most of my peers would rather work with brilliant jerk than a friendly average person. But most people are not brilliant, and then you can't afford to not have soft skills.
- JumpCrisscross 9mo ago
  > if you're very good at what you do, soft skills are a lot less important Empathy is more than butter. It also lets you uncover why the requirements should be what they are. There are roles where buried brilliance works. But it’s usually in academia or the military. Not commercial work.
  - luckylion 9mo ago
    I have no experience with the military and very little with working in academia, but a lot with commercial work, and I've seen it work many times. Clearly those people wouldn't be the ones talking to customers or leading teams, but it's worth a lot to have someone that can tackle hard problems. I'm not at all saying that you can only have one or the other, or that soft skills don't matter at all. It's just my experience that output matters a lot more than people say in these types of conversations. To me looks a lot more like the cliche Diva in music - are you really going to not work with someone extremely talented just because they're difficult to work with and you wouldn't want to hang out with them?
    - JumpCrisscross 9mo ago
      > it's worth a lot to have someone that can tackle hard problems Oh, absolutely. My point is those personalities are almost common in the military and academia. They’re rarer in commerce because there aren’t that many niches where hard problems exist independent of peoples’ preferences. (As in, choosing how to scope the hard problem is part of what makes it hard. And the scoping that works best isn’t going to be found in isolation from customers and others working on the problem.)
bdangubic 9mo ago
I respectfully disagree. Over 3 decades as SWEs I have seen many devs who did absolutely nothing but hack - two of them were autistic too. The “everything is numbers” is small fraction of the industry but perhaps since this is HN maybe resonates more with people?
- coldtea 9mo ago
  Very likely way more than 2 of them
gambiting 9mo ago
>>But it's never been the case that a dev could just focus on technical things and not spend any time figuring out the context they are working in, and behaving accordingly. I've worked with plenty of programmers who were absolutely insufferable human beings but were some kind of supernatural coders who were doing the work of 20 people or were literally the only people who could understand the maths or physics or rendering in our products - so everyone kinda put up with it. I used to know someone who had dozens of HR complaints about them every year and nothing was done because the company didn't think they could risk firing them. So yeah. They exist. And I don't think AI is going to do much about them, but I'd love to be proven wrong.
- lwhi 9mo ago
  There are lots of developers who are able to lean into their inclination to be non-communicative. In many cases I think this inclination is at least partly due to neuro diversity; but I've met some who are simply genuinely unpleasant.
  - luckylion 9mo ago
    To the outside, the difference is hard to tell, isn't it? Between neuro-diversity and genuine unpleasantness -- isn't it mostly that one has a diagnosis (that you know of) and the other does not? You might change your moral judgement of someone's behavior if you find out they have this or that condition (at least I do), but it doesn't change how their behavior impacts you, does it? If it did, I think the best you could do is to assume that everyone has some sort of condition that makes them act the way they do, and it'll be less of a problem.
    - lwhi 9mo ago
      As someone who's neurodiverse myself, I do want to agree with this. Having said that, I do think it's possible for someone to choose to be an asshole and be neurodiverse at the same time. I wouldn't ever want my neurodiversity to be a free pass for any type of behaviour myself.
ragall 9mo ago
> But it's never been the case that a dev could just focus on technical things and not spend any time figuring out the context they are working in, and behaving accordingly. This is factually wrong. Until a few decades ago in tech, and it's still like that in most economic sectors and I dare say most countries, it's the managers that take the role of figuring out the organization and interfacing with other teams. An engineer being only in charge of technical issues but nothing business-related was the norm; that would yield no promotion into management, of course, but still the norm.
- KellyCriterion 9mo ago
  Yes, but it goes more far than that: You will have to participate in meetings, you will be asked to joing for a lunch, you will be asked to contact a customer/devcontact there, you will be asked to attend some events, you will be asked to communicate with others etc. You are not existing as isolated particle in vacuum behind your screen :-)
  - mainguy 9mo ago
    IDK, at many large orgs...there are developers that essentially communicate through "tickets" and "their lead"... and Def never talk to "business" people or customers. It's not very rare if you get a large enough org.
    - woooooo 9mo ago
      In other large orgs, the managers are in a parallel universe playing status games while the devs self-organize to get anything done. The soft skills involved in doing that wind up being completely invisible to the status universe.
      - ethbr1 9mo ago
        > The soft skills involved in doing that wind up being completely invisible to the status universe. Are you referring to the work the managers are doing or the devs are doing as being invisible?
vbezhenar 9mo ago
I neglected soft skills and I survived so far. I'm bad at soft skills and I probably have some sort of mental disorder like autism or something. I don't really care, I don't enjoy interacting with people and I prefer interacting with machines as much as possible. I've found a place that pays me for my technical skills and does not bother me with human interactions, I think there are more places like that in the world.
- bartread 9mo ago
  > I think there are more places like that in the world. There are but not as many as we might like. I’d say I’ve learned to be decent on the soft skills side but it comes at a cost and the need to overutilise them can be incredibly draining. So many places run Agile so it feels like software engineering for noisy extroverts but, to me, it just makes it so hard to get anything done, and I see others struggling the same way. One of my pet peeves is how bad people are at, or perhaps how unwilling they are to embrace, asynchronous communication. Again, this favours the extroverts. And then one key advantage of written communication nowadays is I can ask an LLM to help me with it so my message lands better. More than once, when dealing with particularly frustrating situations, I’ve asked ChatGPT to rewrite an email for me “so that I come across as a reasonable human being rather than a deranged psychopath”. It works.
  - shiroiuma 9mo ago
    >So many places run Agile so it feels like software engineering for noisy extroverts but, to me, it just makes it so hard to get anything done, and I see others struggling the same way. Interesting. I'm very introverted too, but I worked at one Agile place, and it was like a dream for me. Maybe it was just the way they implemented it. What I liked was that I didn't need to talk to people much, outside of the bi-weekly planning meetings (which were large enough that I didn't have to actually speak up much). Instead, we used Jira to track everything: tasks were broken down into tickets, and I could see at a glance what everyone on the team was working on at the time, what work remained to be done, etc. When I finished a task and put it up for review, I could just go find another unassigned ticket and grab that and start working on it, instead of having to talk to anyone (like the boss). We did a lot of code review too, but here again, it was all through Jira/Gitlab/etc., not in person. So I could spend time reviewing other people's merge requests, writing my comments, etc. The only time I really needed to talk to team members was 1) during the morning stand-up, which was quick, 2) during the bi-weekly sprint review and sprint planning meetings, and 3) if someone was stuck and wanted to work together in-person on a problem (not often). By contrast, I'm now stuck in a poorly-run place doing waterfall development, and it's awful. I don't know what anyone is working on usually, because everything is verbal (we do use Jira, but I can only see my own pre-assigned tasks), I don't have a good idea of what the group is doing, the timeline for anything, how anything is progressing, if there's other things I could help with or add input to before someone goes the wrong direction, etc. The manager just runs thing in a completely authoritarian manner. I wish I could just go back to my old Agile workplace.
winternett 9mo ago
McDonalds and Taco Bell tried to get rid of their "soft skills" (AKA customer service} and look how they're doing right now... Endless stores that all look & feel the same -- uncomfortable seats, no happy families around for longer than 10 minutes, longer drive-thru lines, and impersonal & impatient staff that avoids customers like the plague. Evangelists will preach Ai because it's good for corporations that don't care about customer needs, but in the same sense, it may well be the catalyst for many to move out of cities to more human areas as it grows. Businesses dictate the spread of Ai, and then foist it on customers because they think monopolies are sustainable, but the foundational rules always ring true -- Customer service & commitment are essential to the survival of a business. This tone deaf approach will eventually alienate many from companies that adopt it, and there aren't enough tech-inclined introverts to sustain profit in a world where Ai takes everyone's jobs. We don't ALWAYS want to talk to vending machines, human interaction is a need for many that Ai evangelists seem to think will simply go away. I hope there are still some reasonable minded business leaders out there to swoop in and fix things after the ashes this era leaves along with all the VC carnage & political damage rendered on our economy. Ai is great for math though... Maybe that should be the less-destructive focus.
- u8080 9mo ago
  >uncomfortable seats, no happy families around for longer than 10 minutes Which is probably also net positive for business - similar to loud music in the pubs is a deliberate choice so people could focus on drinking rather than talking?
- shiroiuma 9mo ago
  >McDonalds and Taco Bell tried to get rid of their "soft skills" (AKA customer service} and look how they're doing right now... Endless stores that all look & feel the same -- uncomfortable seats, no happy families around for longer than 10 minutes, longer drive-thru lines, and impersonal & impatient staff that avoids customers like the plague. How's their profitability? Long drive-thru lines sounds like business is doing well. This reminds me of people complaining about Windows, with its ads and AI and tracking and such. They don't like it as users, but the company is making plenty of money, so of course it's the right thing to do.
oreally 9mo ago
Overall, it'll be a worse world if you can't make a living purely on hard skills. If soft skills is mostly about sucking up, and there is no demand for any hard skill, you'll find society less able to stand up to the pressures of a majority group, because guess what, they're all too scared to stand up as an individual for fear of dropping the ball on the soft skill. Moreover, the game theory of the soft skill is treacherous and uncertain. There's too many unknown unknowns, it's like not knowing if the dice you're playing is loaded against you. You don't know how many cultural land mines you might step on when interacting with your superior, or if there's a glass ceiling enforced by a group who will nitpick on minor irrelevant 'faults'. Whereas compare soft skills to hard skills, you have a major advantage in certainty. There is a dice loaded in your favor. You know you can get much of the stuff done, and once you've reached the desired results, that's all there is to it. I also could go on on how soft skills erodes human's capacity for judging what is value, instead basing their opinions on the majority source of opinions... It'll definitely be a much more irrational world to live in.
- pdpi 9mo ago
  I'm sorry, but that's nonsense. Soft skills are mostly definitely not about sucking up. At a previous job, the PM for another team often asked me to join some of their meetings — her engineers were shit at talking to non-technical people, so, for critical meetings, she asked me to join to serve as an interpreter of sorts. That's soft skills at work. Talking to stakeholders and understanding what they need? Soft skills. Understanding the different between important and urgent? Soft skills. Being able to assess a candidate during an interview? Soft skills. Navigating cultural differences when you have offices or suppliers abroad? Soft skills. I'd go as far as to say that the single biggest difference between a junior and a senior engineer is how well developed their soft skills are.
  - oreally 9mo ago
    Perhaps it's a poor choice of words, what I mean by 'sucking up' refers to understanding the counterparty's mind (and making decisions to close the deal), and it is definitely a part of the game. Every single thing that you listed requires a understanding of the opposing party that you just talked about in order to make the deal work out. A boss has his/her temper to deal with, her engineers have their own preferences, and that sucks, because as I said the game of soft skills can be a cultural landmine equivalent to rolling a dice with unknown odds. If that is the only game in town, the result could turn out to be like the USA's politics of today, with no way to deviate/defect if you disagree.
raxxorraxor 9mo ago
Also the vast majority of sw engineers just have average soft skills. There is still a difference to sales and we certainly do not need any more pretentious behaviour in technical discussions. Yes, VCs will require you to advertise yourself, but I think many also just want a realistic approach about a potential business ventures. The most practical problem sw engineers have here that they waste hours on some frivolous technical solution that could have been cleared up with a pragmatic approach through a three minute call. That engineers aren't people persons is a stereotype. There are as many "autists" in the social sciences. Yes, I know I shouldn't use that word for anything that is not a pathological diagnosis.
- ethbr1 9mo ago
  Soft skills, in the context it's used here, include communication skills. A key part of communication is being able to communicate ideas with someone not like you (different expertise, background, touchpoints). Imho, a lot of software developers suck at that. (Obligatory: 'I talk to the customers so the engineers don't have to') To the article's point, this becomes an increasingly valuable and critical skill the closer software development moves to the original requesting users. Or the closer the ability to code moves to people who were already talking to users. Personally? I view myself as a problem solver: whether I solve a problem with code, a new technology, a conversation with a colleague, a deep dive discovery session with a SME, or a month-long series of political meetings with conflicting stakeholders, I don't care.

MattGaiser 9mo ago

There are plenty of devs who do nothing beyond taking a Jira ticket scoped by others, implementing it, and then grabbing the next ticket. While they may not have been very successful, they did have a place.

verelo 9mo ago
You’re right but i have always preferred people who can do a little more. Nothing against the socially awkward and conflict avoidant nature in many of these friends, but people who push back and fight to communicate their views and passions often got our team better outcomes than someone who just turns up and does the work they’re asked to do.
- PunchyHamster 9mo ago
  As long as it is not opposite set of skills (talks a lot without knowledge to back it up so essentially using charisma to convince people to do the wrong thing most of the time) then yes, a lil bit of negotiation can save you a whole lot of work in the long run (XY problems being one example)
  - verelo 9mo ago
    For sure, I’ve been tricked into hiring those people before too. It’s good that there’s still something hard in running an organization, the whole “what is value?” question feels like it’ll be one of the few things we have to maintain work for humans over the next little while.
miav 9mo ago
Is this genuinely common? I’ve only ever seen that level of hand holding extended to new grad hires.
- kube-system 9mo ago
  It definitely happens at bloated organizations that aren’t really good at software development. I think it is especially more common in organizations where software is a cost center and business rules involve a specialized discipline that software developers wouldn’t typically have expertise in.
- veyh 9mo ago
  I have 13 years of professional experience, and I work in a small company (15 people). Apart from one or two weekly meetings, I mostly just work on stuff independently. I'm the solo developer for a number of projects ranging from embedded microcontrollers to distributed backend systems. There's very little handholding; it's more like requirements come in, and results come out. I have been part of some social circles before but they were always centered around a common activity like a game, and once that activity went away, so did those connections. As I started working on side hustles, it occurred to me that not having any kind of social network (not even social media accounts) may have added an additional level of difficulty. I am still working on the side hustles, though.
  - nuancebydefault 9mo ago
    > it's more like requirements come in, and results come out. Wow someone is very good at setting requirements. I have never seen that in 25 years of dev life.
    - veyh 9mo ago
      Of course, sometimes people realize that what they asked for wasn't actually what was needed.
      - pmg101 9mo ago
sbrother 9mo ago
I've heard this, and I've even seen it in plenty of poorly performing businesses, but I've never actually seen it in a highly performing, profitable tech company. Other than at the new grad level but it's treated as net-negative training while they learn how to build consensus and scope out work. Not coincidentally, the places I've seen this approach to work are the same places that have hired me as a consultant to bring an effective team to build something high priority or fix a dumpster fire.
- tikhonj 9mo ago
  A lot of highly performing teams don't even use tickets.
  - win311fwg 9mo ago
    Do any highly performing teams use tickets? A fly-by-night charlatan successfully pushed ticking into our organization in the past year and I would say it was a disaster. I only have the experience of one, but from that experience I am now not sure you can even build good software that way. I originally hoped it was growing pains, but I see more and more fundamental flaws.
    - yurishimo 9mo ago
      I’ve worked at one, but it required a PM who was ruthless about cutting scope and we focused on user stories after establishing a strong feedback pipeline, both technically through CI/CD/tests and with stakeholders. Looking back, that was the best team I’ve ever worked in. We split up to separate corners of the company once the project was delivered (12 month buildout of an alpha that was internally tested and then fleshed out). Maybe I had greenfield glasses but I came in for the last 3 months and it was still humming.
    - layer8 9mo ago
      How do you keep track of tasks that need to be done, of reported bugs and feature requests?
pjmlp 9mo ago
Looks very robotic to me, never worked on a place where meetings and dealing with other humans wasn't part of the job.
- Retric 9mo ago
  I’ve been on plenty of teams where meetings didn’t actually require any meaningful participation from most people.
  - pjmlp 9mo ago
    Never been the case for me, additionally I have always worked in shared desks or offices.
  - nuancebydefault 9mo ago
    Meetings without any meaningful participation from most people? I guess too many people in the meetings?
    - win311fwg 9mo ago
      That is likely referring to what has become known as the standup, where developers read off the commit log for the "manager" who hasn't yet figured out how to use a computer.
      - whstl 9mo ago
        Or for the product manager too lazy to check Jira.
falloutx 9mo ago
People gotta remember its a job just like anything else. I dont see any other profession going above and beyond so why should that be levied upon on programmers, I don't see PMs trying to understand code, CEOs trying to understand the customer more than the investor.

cyanydeez 9mo ago

Often it means being a sociopath

straydusk 9mo ago

There are HOSTS of dogshit devs that operated that way, trust me. Half the job of a PM has been to work with these types of people.

awesome_dude 9mo ago
That really sounds like a PM complaining that "I have to do my actual job of being the bridge between the business and the engineering team" ALL PMs are expected to be doing some translation, otherwise what's the point of their job?
- 9rx 9mo ago
  > otherwise what's the point of their job? Who else is going to move a box from one column to another?
  - steve1977 9mo ago
    Claude?
    - 9rx 9mo ago
      It could be Claude. Or Sally, Joe, or Sue. Whatever name the PM goes by is immaterial.
epolanski 9mo ago
I too met many such developers. Very often some tech lead or head of could spot them and put them on tasks where they could be autonomous (generally technical but important aspects that bogs down several teams or products: pipelines, tooling, api design, performance, etc). Some could also be involved in features involving business logic but the lead/PM would make sure to put more details or streamline any feedback/questions through jira. Also, there's even more developers out there that get complacent on the business aspect after some time of seeing how poor product and business development is, and just phase out of it completely and try to find solace in the technicalities. If feels sometimes like many on HN live in ultra competitive bubbles with managers pushing people to grow and promote them like it works in Meta and similar, but that's really not the norm, it's the exception. Many of us work in companies where software is an expense, not an asset, mentality is different, there are no such structures, management and product are crap and you find a wide variety of situations and devs.

themafia 9mo ago

It's the vibe coders who would love to pretend that the opposite end of the spectrum from them is "artisinal coding." They honestly have no idea what "software engineering" in a professional context even looks like. So they come up with this prattle.

Eisenstein 9mo ago
Blaming people who use technology to make a valuable process accessible to themselves and then invoking a a no-true-Scotsman in order to defend the status quo is a good example of a lack of soft skills.
- JohnLeitch 9mo ago
  But the process is still inaccessible to them, provided we consider achieving reliability and security goals of said process. And no, this is not "no true Scotsman;" "vibe coded" software is demonstrably inferior in numerous ways, and outright dangerous in some contexts. No number of carefully scripted demos or PR campaigns is going to change this reality.
  - ethbr1 9mo ago
    The joke about vibe coding replacing junior devs is apt, because it has the same failure mode -- it can build something that works, but completely incompetently and with unmaintainable design choices. Consequently, this was the reason businesses had junior devs partnered with senior devs! It's not surprising that when you pair junior devs (human) with junior devs (gen ai coding) you still get junior dev issues. Personally, I think AI coding tools being able to translate incomplete junior dev thinking into senior dev work is an impossible task. There's just not enough initial intent signal in the novel task use case (read non-'CRUD LOB app'). I do think eventually we'll have complementary expert tools that perform a senior dev-alike function (arch and security review), but that's a harder problem that likely isn't going to be economically viable as a product until/unless AI coding tools achieve substantial penetration.
- sillywabbit 9mo ago

luckylion 9mo ago

It depends on what you want to achieve as a developer, I think. Having some soft skills makes a lot of things easier, but if you don't have the hard skills to back it up, you'll plateau unless you switch to management before you reach your limit. At the same time, if you're very good at what you do, soft skills are a lot less important. Most of my peers would rather work with brilliant jerk than a friendly average person. But most people are not brilliant, and then you can't afford to not have soft skills.

JumpCrisscross 9mo ago
> if you're very good at what you do, soft skills are a lot less important Empathy is more than butter. It also lets you uncover why the requirements should be what they are. There are roles where buried brilliance works. But it’s usually in academia or the military. Not commercial work.
- luckylion 9mo ago
  I have no experience with the military and very little with working in academia, but a lot with commercial work, and I've seen it work many times. Clearly those people wouldn't be the ones talking to customers or leading teams, but it's worth a lot to have someone that can tackle hard problems. I'm not at all saying that you can only have one or the other, or that soft skills don't matter at all. It's just my experience that output matters a lot more than people say in these types of conversations. To me looks a lot more like the cliche Diva in music - are you really going to not work with someone extremely talented just because they're difficult to work with and you wouldn't want to hang out with them?
  - JumpCrisscross 9mo ago
    > it's worth a lot to have someone that can tackle hard problems Oh, absolutely. My point is those personalities are almost common in the military and academia. They’re rarer in commerce because there aren’t that many niches where hard problems exist independent of peoples’ preferences. (As in, choosing how to scope the hard problem is part of what makes it hard. And the scoping that works best isn’t going to be found in isolation from customers and others working on the problem.)

bdangubic 9mo ago

I respectfully disagree. Over 3 decades as SWEs I have seen many devs who did absolutely nothing but hack - two of them were autistic too. The “everything is numbers” is small fraction of the industry but perhaps since this is HN maybe resonates more with people?

coldtea 9mo ago
Very likely way more than 2 of them

gambiting 9mo ago

>>But it's never been the case that a dev could just focus on technical things and not spend any time figuring out the context they are working in, and behaving accordingly. I've worked with plenty of programmers who were absolutely insufferable human beings but were some kind of supernatural coders who were doing the work of 20 people or were literally the only people who could understand the maths or physics or rendering in our products - so everyone kinda put up with it. I used to know someone who had dozens of HR complaints about them every year and nothing was done because the company didn't think they could risk firing them. So yeah. They exist. And I don't think AI is going to do much about them, but I'd love to be proven wrong.

lwhi 9mo ago
There are lots of developers who are able to lean into their inclination to be non-communicative. In many cases I think this inclination is at least partly due to neuro diversity; but I've met some who are simply genuinely unpleasant.
- luckylion 9mo ago
  To the outside, the difference is hard to tell, isn't it? Between neuro-diversity and genuine unpleasantness -- isn't it mostly that one has a diagnosis (that you know of) and the other does not? You might change your moral judgement of someone's behavior if you find out they have this or that condition (at least I do), but it doesn't change how their behavior impacts you, does it? If it did, I think the best you could do is to assume that everyone has some sort of condition that makes them act the way they do, and it'll be less of a problem.
  - lwhi 9mo ago
    As someone who's neurodiverse myself, I do want to agree with this. Having said that, I do think it's possible for someone to choose to be an asshole and be neurodiverse at the same time. I wouldn't ever want my neurodiversity to be a free pass for any type of behaviour myself.

ragall 9mo ago

> But it's never been the case that a dev could just focus on technical things and not spend any time figuring out the context they are working in, and behaving accordingly. This is factually wrong. Until a few decades ago in tech, and it's still like that in most economic sectors and I dare say most countries, it's the managers that take the role of figuring out the organization and interfacing with other teams. An engineer being only in charge of technical issues but nothing business-related was the norm; that would yield no promotion into management, of course, but still the norm.

KellyCriterion 9mo ago
Yes, but it goes more far than that: You will have to participate in meetings, you will be asked to joing for a lunch, you will be asked to contact a customer/devcontact there, you will be asked to attend some events, you will be asked to communicate with others etc. You are not existing as isolated particle in vacuum behind your screen :-)
- mainguy 9mo ago
  IDK, at many large orgs...there are developers that essentially communicate through "tickets" and "their lead"... and Def never talk to "business" people or customers. It's not very rare if you get a large enough org.
  - woooooo 9mo ago
    In other large orgs, the managers are in a parallel universe playing status games while the devs self-organize to get anything done. The soft skills involved in doing that wind up being completely invisible to the status universe.
    - ethbr1 9mo ago
      > The soft skills involved in doing that wind up being completely invisible to the status universe. Are you referring to the work the managers are doing or the devs are doing as being invisible?

vbezhenar 9mo ago

I neglected soft skills and I survived so far. I'm bad at soft skills and I probably have some sort of mental disorder like autism or something. I don't really care, I don't enjoy interacting with people and I prefer interacting with machines as much as possible. I've found a place that pays me for my technical skills and does not bother me with human interactions, I think there are more places like that in the world.

bartread 9mo ago
> I think there are more places like that in the world. There are but not as many as we might like. I’d say I’ve learned to be decent on the soft skills side but it comes at a cost and the need to overutilise them can be incredibly draining. So many places run Agile so it feels like software engineering for noisy extroverts but, to me, it just makes it so hard to get anything done, and I see others struggling the same way. One of my pet peeves is how bad people are at, or perhaps how unwilling they are to embrace, asynchronous communication. Again, this favours the extroverts. And then one key advantage of written communication nowadays is I can ask an LLM to help me with it so my message lands better. More than once, when dealing with particularly frustrating situations, I’ve asked ChatGPT to rewrite an email for me “so that I come across as a reasonable human being rather than a deranged psychopath”. It works.
- shiroiuma 9mo ago
  >So many places run Agile so it feels like software engineering for noisy extroverts but, to me, it just makes it so hard to get anything done, and I see others struggling the same way. Interesting. I'm very introverted too, but I worked at one Agile place, and it was like a dream for me. Maybe it was just the way they implemented it. What I liked was that I didn't need to talk to people much, outside of the bi-weekly planning meetings (which were large enough that I didn't have to actually speak up much). Instead, we used Jira to track everything: tasks were broken down into tickets, and I could see at a glance what everyone on the team was working on at the time, what work remained to be done, etc. When I finished a task and put it up for review, I could just go find another unassigned ticket and grab that and start working on it, instead of having to talk to anyone (like the boss). We did a lot of code review too, but here again, it was all through Jira/Gitlab/etc., not in person. So I could spend time reviewing other people's merge requests, writing my comments, etc. The only time I really needed to talk to team members was 1) during the morning stand-up, which was quick, 2) during the bi-weekly sprint review and sprint planning meetings, and 3) if someone was stuck and wanted to work together in-person on a problem (not often). By contrast, I'm now stuck in a poorly-run place doing waterfall development, and it's awful. I don't know what anyone is working on usually, because everything is verbal (we do use Jira, but I can only see my own pre-assigned tasks), I don't have a good idea of what the group is doing, the timeline for anything, how anything is progressing, if there's other things I could help with or add input to before someone goes the wrong direction, etc. The manager just runs thing in a completely authoritarian manner. I wish I could just go back to my old Agile workplace.

winternett 9mo ago

McDonalds and Taco Bell tried to get rid of their "soft skills" (AKA customer service} and look how they're doing right now... Endless stores that all look & feel the same -- uncomfortable seats, no happy families around for longer than 10 minutes, longer drive-thru lines, and impersonal & impatient staff that avoids customers like the plague. Evangelists will preach Ai because it's good for corporations that don't care about customer needs, but in the same sense, it may well be the catalyst for many to move out of cities to more human areas as it grows. Businesses dictate the spread of Ai, and then foist it on customers because they think monopolies are sustainable, but the foundational rules always ring true -- Customer service & commitment are essential to the survival of a business. This tone deaf approach will eventually alienate many from companies that adopt it, and there aren't enough tech-inclined introverts to sustain profit in a world where Ai takes everyone's jobs. We don't ALWAYS want to talk to vending machines, human interaction is a need for many that Ai evangelists seem to think will simply go away. I hope there are still some reasonable minded business leaders out there to swoop in and fix things after the ashes this era leaves along with all the VC carnage & political damage rendered on our economy. Ai is great for math though... Maybe that should be the less-destructive focus.

u8080 9mo ago
>uncomfortable seats, no happy families around for longer than 10 minutes Which is probably also net positive for business - similar to loud music in the pubs is a deliberate choice so people could focus on drinking rather than talking?
shiroiuma 9mo ago
>McDonalds and Taco Bell tried to get rid of their "soft skills" (AKA customer service} and look how they're doing right now... Endless stores that all look & feel the same -- uncomfortable seats, no happy families around for longer than 10 minutes, longer drive-thru lines, and impersonal & impatient staff that avoids customers like the plague. How's their profitability? Long drive-thru lines sounds like business is doing well. This reminds me of people complaining about Windows, with its ads and AI and tracking and such. They don't like it as users, but the company is making plenty of money, so of course it's the right thing to do.

oreally 9mo ago

Overall, it'll be a worse world if you can't make a living purely on hard skills. If soft skills is mostly about sucking up, and there is no demand for any hard skill, you'll find society less able to stand up to the pressures of a majority group, because guess what, they're all too scared to stand up as an individual for fear of dropping the ball on the soft skill. Moreover, the game theory of the soft skill is treacherous and uncertain. There's too many unknown unknowns, it's like not knowing if the dice you're playing is loaded against you. You don't know how many cultural land mines you might step on when interacting with your superior, or if there's a glass ceiling enforced by a group who will nitpick on minor irrelevant 'faults'. Whereas compare soft skills to hard skills, you have a major advantage in certainty. There is a dice loaded in your favor. You know you can get much of the stuff done, and once you've reached the desired results, that's all there is to it. I also could go on on how soft skills erodes human's capacity for judging what is value, instead basing their opinions on the majority source of opinions... It'll definitely be a much more irrational world to live in.

pdpi 9mo ago
I'm sorry, but that's nonsense. Soft skills are mostly definitely not about sucking up. At a previous job, the PM for another team often asked me to join some of their meetings — her engineers were shit at talking to non-technical people, so, for critical meetings, she asked me to join to serve as an interpreter of sorts. That's soft skills at work. Talking to stakeholders and understanding what they need? Soft skills. Understanding the different between important and urgent? Soft skills. Being able to assess a candidate during an interview? Soft skills. Navigating cultural differences when you have offices or suppliers abroad? Soft skills. I'd go as far as to say that the single biggest difference between a junior and a senior engineer is how well developed their soft skills are.
- oreally 9mo ago
  Perhaps it's a poor choice of words, what I mean by 'sucking up' refers to understanding the counterparty's mind (and making decisions to close the deal), and it is definitely a part of the game. Every single thing that you listed requires a understanding of the opposing party that you just talked about in order to make the deal work out. A boss has his/her temper to deal with, her engineers have their own preferences, and that sucks, because as I said the game of soft skills can be a cultural landmine equivalent to rolling a dice with unknown odds. If that is the only game in town, the result could turn out to be like the USA's politics of today, with no way to deviate/defect if you disagree.

raxxorraxor 9mo ago

Also the vast majority of sw engineers just have average soft skills. There is still a difference to sales and we certainly do not need any more pretentious behaviour in technical discussions. Yes, VCs will require you to advertise yourself, but I think many also just want a realistic approach about a potential business ventures. The most practical problem sw engineers have here that they waste hours on some frivolous technical solution that could have been cleared up with a pragmatic approach through a three minute call. That engineers aren't people persons is a stereotype. There are as many "autists" in the social sciences. Yes, I know I shouldn't use that word for anything that is not a pathological diagnosis.

ethbr1 9mo ago
Soft skills, in the context it's used here, include communication skills. A key part of communication is being able to communicate ideas with someone not like you (different expertise, background, touchpoints). Imho, a lot of software developers suck at that. (Obligatory: 'I talk to the customers so the engineers don't have to') To the article's point, this becomes an increasingly valuable and critical skill the closer software development moves to the original requesting users. Or the closer the ability to code moves to people who were already talking to users. Personally? I view myself as a problem solver: whether I solve a problem with code, a new technology, a conversation with a colleague, a deep dive discovery session with a SME, or a month-long series of political meetings with conflicting stakeholders, I don't care.