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I feel like this is anti-progress. My industry's success depends on me sitting in my room coding and not having a gf.
by etagobla 7y ago
I feel like this is anti-progress. My industry's success depends on me sitting in my room coding and not having a gf.
- lisper 7y ago> My industry's success Maybe you need to choose a different quality metric.
- beat 7y agoSocial skills are a huge part of my own IT work. If you can use social skills effectively, you get to decide (to some degree) what you work on. If you don't, then someone else decides what you work on. As long as you're okay with that trade, there's nothing wrong with it.
- username90 7y agoNo social skills needed, you just need to be honest. So say that you'll leave because the current work is boring/stressful and the will let you choose the project you want if you are any good. Also usually they want to put their best developers on the most interesting problems so they'd ask you to do it anyway.
- ck425 7y agoThere's a skill to being honest in a productive way. Being honest in a way that communicates your thoughts and gets people engaged rather than defensive is really difficult but really valuable. But if you don't yet have that skill being completely honest will hinder you.
- username90 7y agoMaybe we are just thinking of different things when we talk about social skills? I think of things like being able to participate in small talk all day or participating in social events. I am very good at reading people and understand how they think and how they would react to different things I say, so in some way I got good social skills, but I'm pretty sure most people would say that I have bad social skills since I don't like social situations and therefore don't build connections.
- beat 7y agoHonestly? That's not how development works at all, in my experience. Best developers aren't isolated on "most interesting problems", but rather, are getting constantly sucked into war rooms and emergency calls. And when they are working on "interesting problems", they are constantly working, verbally and in writing, to convince reluctant management and other engineers to agree to their new, "interesting" approach to the problem in question. Those are massively social behaviors. "Being honest" is necessary but not sufficient. Understanding people's motivations, finding reasons for them to believe your idea is beneficial for them and their own interests, that's what gets you what you want. Here's an example. I am trying to do important, interesting work, but I'm often interrupted, because I work in DevOps and wind up drawn into other people's problems. So on the whiteboard next to my desk, I wrote my two "Wildly Important Goals" (from the book Four Disciplines of Execution), and underneath that, the sentence "If something does not apply to these goals, why am I doing it?" This became quite the controversy, but it works! It has significantly reduced my interruptions. That's social skill in action.
- jakeinspace 7y agoIf you're serious, that's an awfully dark thought.
- alistairSH 7y agoYour personal success may depend on your ability to communicate with your peers, managers, and subordinates. The linked page is not exclusively about finding a mate; in fact, on a quick scan, I didn’t see that mentioned at all.
- putnambr 7y agoYour industry's success requires you to be effective. Doing work for more than eight hours a day leads to burnout, and not doing anything besides sitting in your room prevents you from being creative. The more diverse experiences, interests, and skills you have, the more creative you'll be.
- BurningFrog 7y agoYou need to be coding, but you also need to cooperate and relate with your coworkers.
- Sindrome 7y agoStop wasting time voicing your feelings and get back to drilling LeetCode before you lose your job.
- etagobla 7y agoThank you, I needed to hear this.
- swiley 7y agoIf being a software engineer and having a girlfriend are mutually exclusive then I’ll find something else to do.
- rmbryan 7y agoI have evidence that they are not mutually exclusive.
- rhinoceraptor 7y agoEspecially since most people really can't read or write code for more than 4-6 hours a day. If you're working more than eight hours, you're either in crunch (and consider leaving for a new job), or your day is being filled with useless meetings and other non-work.
- Carpetsmoker 7y agoSome of the worst and most ineffective coworkers I've ever worked with were intelligent, knowledgable, skilled, and severally lacking in the social skills department. In some cases I've seen the more abrasive and toxic variants of these people completely crush morale for the rest of the team or company, and destroy any success. They were a net loss to the company. Yeah, social skills matter. A lot. It's not about having a girlfriend, it's about effective communication with the people you work with.
- collyw 7y agoI am coming to the conclusion that social skills are probably more valuable than coding skills. I don't think I am especially productive in my current job due to a lot of context switching, but I think they like me for my attitude.
- ShteiLoups 7y ago"Engineering is a team sport" - me You need to be able to work with others to produce things, unless you always work alone. Social skills are a very important part of that.
- username90 7y agoThe ability to partition work into independent chunks is way more important than social skills when you work as a software engineer with other software engineers. Then they can work on their things and you can work on yours with little need for further communication. And don't come saying that divvying up technical tasks is a social skill, it really isn't.
- saagarjha 7y agoAt some point your work needs to interact with other people's.
- username90 7y ago
- christiansakai 7y agoI have a wife, I code, exercise, play weekend music gig, do aquascaping, and read various theological books and random books in random topics. . . . . . . Too bad I suck at all those above, and still suck in my social skills.
- rmbryan 7y agoaquascaping sounds interesting. is there an online community you recommend?
- 77pt77 7y agoWhat is aquascaping?
- TacticalTable 7y agoMaking aesthetically pleasing fishtanks, typically with live plants.
- 77pt77 7y agoIt does sound interesting Thanks!
- irrational 7y agoI was thinking it meant things like koi ponds.
- liveoneggs 7y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/PlantedTank/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PlantedTank/
- Cyberdog 7y agoIs your wife still with you? Are people still paying you to code and play music? Has the exercise contributed positively to your health? If yes, then you probably don't suck very much at those things after all.
- United857 7y agoOnce you get past a certain point in your engineering career, in order to grow more you'll need to take on more responsibility than one person can reasonably do. Then it's more about leading and influencing others and getting them to jump onboard, even if you're an individual contributor.
- nitely 7y agoAssuming you care about taking on more responsibility. That's not the path for everyone, though. I'm fine being just a very experienced programmer. I couldn't care less about "leading".
- bitwize 7y agoYour industry's success depends on you being an effective communicator and "people person". Technical skills are table stakes. What gets you the job, the promotion, the fun project is how well you deal with others and function on a team.