10 ms·

Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills

230 points by quanwinn 8mo ago

juicytip 8mo ago
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RcouF1uZ4gsC 8mo ago
Thank Open Source and Free Software which commodified hard skills and pushed business to value them as zero.
marsven_422 8mo ago
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yapyap 8mo ago
You never really could. If you hear of a (very) succesful software engineer with horrid soft skills they’re a 1%er chance wise
- commandlinefan 8mo ago
  I’ve been hearing this since the 90’s.
  - ambicapter 8mo ago
    I feel like it's a myth promoted by engineers with poor soft skills to justify themselves never learning said skills.
    - mawadev 8mo ago
      How do you learn soft skills? Maybe you have a point there
      - ambicapter 8mo ago
        Watching other people do it better than you, or reading about it and trying things yourself would be two ways I can think of.
anon946 8mo ago
The irony here is that universities are struggling to teach writing skills, due to massive cheating with AI.
- LatencyKills 8mo ago
  I mentor CS students at two local universities. The best students are using gen ai to enhance their learning and understanding (i.e. they use it as a tool instead of a crutch). The worst students are using it in attempt to “level the playing field” and are failing miserably. It is easy to determine if someone solved a problem using AI because they can’t explain or recreate “their” solution. Detecting cheating in essays is still far more difficult.
  - HarHarVeryFunny 8mo ago
    You could probably detect essay cheating (AI written) in the exact same way by questioning the student about it - why did they organize the essay in this way, what was their motivation for focusing on X, or expressing something as Y... Of course anyone can concoct an explanation on the fly, but it should be obvious if they are speaking from the experience of having authored it or just coming up with a post-hoc rationalization. If they had AI write the essay, yet can still explain it as well as if they had written it themselves (ditto for code), then it would tend to indicate that they at least read it and thought about it, which I think should be more acceptable in a learning environment.
    - aleph_minus_one 8mo ago
      > You could probably detect essay cheating (AI written) in the exact same way by questioning the student about it - why did they organize the essay in this way, what was their motivation for focusing on X, or expressing something as Y... Of course anyone can concoct an explanation on the fly, but it should be obvious if they are speaking from the experience of having authored it or just coming up with a post-hoc rationalization. I wouldn't claim that I am bad at writing (at least in my native language, which is not English) - at least many colleagues say so. But I do insist that when writing I don't think that way. If I were to answer these question, my honest answers would be: "why did they organize the essay in this way": I just wrote down the thoughts that came to my mind, and then gave them some structure that seemed right. "what was their motivation for focusing on X": Either "because it felt right" or "I had to write at most x pages, and indeed it would have made sense to focus on more topics, so I focused on this arbitrary thing" So indeed I would claim that a lot of sensible reasons why things are this way actually are post-hoc rationalizations. :-)
joshuaisaact 8mo ago
This couldn't ring more true to me - I think one of the consequences of the rapid change in the profession we are seeing is that skills that typically were required only at more senior levels become required further down the stack. If I was a junior today, I'd be studying business impact, effective communication, project management, skills that were previously something you could get away with under-indexing on until senior+.
CrulesAll 8mo ago
Software 'engineers' are going to have learn the hard skills that they have gotten by without thus far. The ones who were never engineers in the first place will have to learn 'soft skills' because they are incapable. I believe @ Tsoding put it best: The only thing AI will do, in so far as coding goes, is to remove a lot of people who should never have been in it in the first place.
- flitzofolov 8mo ago
  Can you elaborate on this? What are some examples of skills you think are now essential, that prior have been taken for granted or obviated in some way?
  - CrulesAll 8mo ago
    Beyond engineering itself, strictly computer engineering? How many coders have no idea what goes on behind an IDE. Have not even the slightest notion how a computer works. Who thinks building a computer means watching a Youtube video and buying ready made parts, putting them together, and then think they should be employed by NASA. To begin: Math, Linux, Devops, C, and Assembly. Not a youtube video. Not arithmetic. Learn to the point that you could be employed by any of the above as a senior. And don't fear failure. Keep doing it until you understand it.
    - pgwhalen 8mo ago
      I agree with your original post that the need for hard skills will persist, but I see it in the other direction: software engineers are going to have to get better at thinking in larger abstractions, not deeper understanding of the stack. Those who can only solve problems locally and repeat the patterns they've seen before rather than create new patterns from building blocks are the ones who are going to struggle.
      - CrulesAll 8mo ago
        "software engineers are going to have to get better at thinking in larger abstractions" ........Math was first on my list. I don't know how else to say that.
EGreg 8mo ago
As usual - the advice is essenially rats from a sinking ship all the way. “You all need to do this narrow thing to survive now”. 2016 to truckers: “Learn to code LOL” 2026 to coders: “Learn soft skills” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46436872 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46436872 Look, I personally am taking full advantage of exactly the skills described. I was the one who posted the above thing on HN showing how I am 20-50x more productive now, complete with a 4 hour speedrun video. I usually try not to just talk and point out current problems, but build solutions AND show (github, youtube) with specific details so you can watch it and apply it for yourself. But I am telling you: 1) most people will not adapt, so we will need UBI for those who don’t 2) eventually even those who adapt will be replaced too, so we will need UBI for everybody It is after all a thin layer that remains. I remember Kasparov proudly talked about how “centaurs” (human + machine working together) in chess were better than machines alone… until they weren’t, and human in the loop became a liability. But the problem is more widespread in the last 70 years. Just look around. Industry always tells the individual they can do some individual action downstream to clean up the mess they create upstream, and it is leading the entire planet into ruin: https://magarshak.com/blog/government-and-industry-distract-us-from-solving-systemic-problems/ https://magarshak.com/blog/government-and-industry-distract-... In fact, the human population in modern environments has been living large on an ecological credit card and the bill is coming due for our children, because all the “individual responsibility” stuff — where you can somehow diet, exercise and recycle your way out of things corporations do upstream — is all a gient lie and always has been. So the negative externalities just build up until the next generation won’t be able to ignore them anymore, but it could be too late. Whether that’als day zero for water in cities, or factory farms for meat with antiobiotic resistance, or fossil fuels and greenhouse gases to subsidize the car industry, or ubiqitous microplastic plastic pollution around thr world (yes, personal plastic recycling was just another such scam designed to keep you docile and not organize to force corporations to switch to biodegradeable materials.) The “anthoposcene” is seeing a decline in insects and all species of animal except humans and farm animals. Coral reefs are bleached, kelp forests and rainforests are decimated, and governments work with industry to eg allow Patagonian forests to be burned for new developments and then smokey the bear says “only YOU can prevent forest fires”. Think about it.
- joshuaisaact 8mo ago
dangus 8mo ago
I would submit that this could be based on a stereotype that “coder = antisocial.” Why are we assuming that people who write code don’t have soft skills? The youngest generation who joined the profession are probably in it for the the salary versus the older generations who came from computer clubs and dungeons and dragons groups of the 1970s/1980s along with a culture where having a niche interest was socially ostracizing and uncool. I wonder if the youngest generation entering the profession is much more of a cross section of regular people?
lordnacho 8mo ago
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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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.
netdur 8mo ago
calculators doing a perfect job did not end accountants' jobs, it made it faster.
- Etheryte 8mo ago
  Not necessarily faster, but more easy for sure. There's plenty of stories of proficient abacus using accountants being faster than those using calculators. Those days are gone now though because a calculator is just so much easier to pick up.
- kube-system 8mo ago
  I don’t think that’s as good of an example as you think it is. “Computer” used to be a job title. It was entirely replaced by … drumroll … electronic computers, i.e. calculators. Technology doesn’t usually eliminate the need for a job output in general but it can sometimes shift the skills needed wildly.
- ironbound 8mo ago
  Your sort of paying them to understand the tax code that changes year to year tho
deleted 8mo ago
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marginalia_nu 8mo ago
The sort of people who have been able to neglect their soft skills are probably still going to be able to do so in the future. But those were always the extreme intelligence outliers, generational talent type figures. For most software engineers, neglect of soft skills have always been a career tarpit that leads nowhere you want to end up. Being able to navigate social settings and to communicate well is a force multiplier. For most people, it really doesn't matter how good you are if nobody understands what you are saying and you can't convince other people to buy into your ideas. You far more often see moderately successful charlatans that are all talk than successful people with awful communication skills. Of course if you're able to walk the talk, that's when you can really go places.
- xhevahir 8mo ago
  I think the author would say that the developer who is without soft skills won't merely be prevented from gaining desirable work. They'll be unable to keep a job, period.
  - marginalia_nu 8mo ago
    Seems a pretty sketchy assertion, but regardless whether these people burn out in career purgatory at a java 8 feature factory moving jira tickets around for all of eternity, or they move on to something else entirely, it's probably not what they had in mind.
- MattGaiser 8mo ago
  The shift is from tarpit to unemployment. A Jira ticket processing dev still has use. Probably not for much longer.
  - marginalia_nu 8mo ago
    Doubt we'll see that in the short term. Long term, possibly, especially if you add a financial crisis. Truth is most larger software development organizations could have even before LLMs downsized significantly and not lost much productivity. The X formerly known as Twitter did this and has been chugging along on a fraction on its original staff count. It's had some brand problems since its acquisition, but those are more due to Mr Musk's eccentricities and political ventures than the engineering team. The reason this hasn't happened to any wider degree is quarterly capitalism and institutional inertia. Looks weird to the investors if the organization claims to be doing well but is also slashing its employee count by 90%. Even if you bring a new CEO in that has these ideas, the org chart will fight it with tooth and nail as managers would lose reportees and clout. Consultancies in particular are incredibly inefficient by design since they make more money if they take more time and bring a larger headcount to the task: They don't sell productivity, but man hours. Hence horrors like SAFe.
lolive 8mo ago
Be careful, engineers, when interacting with soft skill experts not to join their reality distortion field where it’s all about coordination, alignment, bizness strategy, clever planning. Whereas the real stuffs are just implémentation details, quickly solved. In the end, they might convince you that 2+2=5.
- CrulesAll 8mo ago
  Wait until you try to explain basic concepts to such people! What's annoying is HR employing more of these people and not understanding why the dial does not move. What is baffling and infuriating is when such people are put in management. MBAs will destroy Western business eventually(those who tag an MBA onto a STEM qualification are not as bad but still infected.)
- ambicapter 8mo ago
  The trouble isn't that they would convince me with their reality distortion (they don't), the issue is that they are satisfied with their "progress" while I'm still asking crucial questions (which they ignore, b/c they don't see the importance).
  - kube-system 8mo ago
    Part of the soft skills that are useful for a developer is being able to frame your crucial questions in a way that makes their importance relevant to their world.
    - hypeatei 8mo ago
      Perhaps soft skills are too squishy and/or broad of a term to be useful then. It seems like these discussions always go "maybe you, as the developer, just need to learn how to do soft skills properly?" in response to business types exhibiting an undesirable behavior. Sure, smooth talking and playing into someones personality might be more successful (albeit with a lot more hot air), but all of you are supposed to be working towards a goal. If someone gets hung up because you weren't smooth enough, I would think they're a bad faith actor who doesn't actually want to get something done.
Yokohiii 8mo ago
In a team environment, half of the job is communication. That LLMs do a better job if you know what you are asking for is old news. But to be honest, I usually don't care to write properly into an LLM prompt. An LLM will ignore grammar and form and just extract the essence. If I make an actual mistake I will notice quickly and fix it. If I'd send slack messages like that to an peer, they'd either mock me or simply think I am dumb. We also know the stories about people that use LLMs for any communication or anything they write. Probably for the exact reason that being lazy with writing is acceptable now. My call is that writing skill will decline, not improve. This could probably be the case for anything that people use LLMs as a proxy for.
- ben_w 8mo ago
  Broadly agree, but one point I think is (sadly) relevant: > That LLMs do a better job if you know what you are asking for is old news. Even a decade after Word Lens had demonstrated augmented reality live translation through a smartphone camera, I was amazing people by showing them the same feature in Google Translate. Similar anecdotes about Shakuntala Devi, even in 2018 I was seeing claims about her mental arithmetic beating a supercomputer (claims that ignored that this happened in 1977 and the computer was already obsolete at the time), even though my mid-2013 MacBook Air could not only beat her by a factor of 150 million, it could also train an AI to read handwritten numbers from scratch in 0.225 seconds, and then perform inference (read numbers) at just over 6,629 digits per second*. You say "old news", I say this discussion will be on repeat even in the early 2030s. And possibly even the 2060s. * Uses an old version of python, you'll need to fix it up accordingly: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2018/03/16-10.44.18.html https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2018/03/16-10.44.18.html
shevy-java 8mo ago
> Today, I use Claude Code for almost all non-trivial programming tasks and have spent $500+ on it just last December. Truthfully, I don't want to get advice from people who become addicted to AI, sorry. The money investment that person did, already leaves me with tons of questions.
- echelon 8mo ago
  > Truthfully, I don't want to get advice from people who become addicted to AI, sorry. If you sleep on this, these people are going to take your job. I've been writing serious systems code for 15 years. Systems that handled billions of dollars of transaction volume a day and whose hourly outages cost billions of dollars. These are systems you have to design carefully. Active-active, beyond five nines reliable. I'm telling you AI is extremely beneficial even in this segment of the market. The value prop is undeniable. I'm easily getting twice my workload done with AI, and I'm not even leveraging the full extent of the tools. I've only just started to do more than fancy tab-autocomplete. This is going to be a huge shift in our industry, and I would brace for impact.
  - sph 8mo ago
    I don’t want to do twice my workload. I’m old enough to have learned that the faster and more efficient you are, the more demands they pile on you, and the net result is more stress, more expectations for the same pay. AI doesn’t solve unreasonable demands, shifting requirements and looming deadlines, does it? And still, writing code is not even the bottleneck, the thinking, meeting stakeholders, figuring out technical problems is. What would I do with a machine that spits out bad code. I guess I’m not cut out for a field where the only metric that counts is how many tickets and lines of code one can churn out in an hour any more.
    - gtowey 8mo ago
      In my 20+ years in the tech industry, the most important thing I have learned is that writing code is the least significant part of being a software engineer. You write code once, but then it's modified endlessly. Supporting and using and improving the code is the majority of the work. LLMs are terrible for that. They tend to write code that isnt easy to read and modify. They don't plan for future use cases. They often paint themselves into a corner with successive modifications, and lose context as the project grows. Don't worry about your job just yet. We are a long long way from replacing people.
karczex 8mo ago
So I opened this article to find out at the very beginning, that author put's a lot of money to AI providers... So probably also used it to write this article. So, according to the rule "text which is not worth of spending time on writing is also no worth of reading" I closed it.
- pavel_lishin 8mo ago
  I found out that the author of a blog post paid a maid to clean their house, and sends their laundry out. Therefore, the blog post was written by the maid, or one of the laundromat employees. So I closed it.
  - ambicapter 8mo ago
    false equivalence
  - rafterydj 8mo ago
    That's a false equivalence. You might read a blog post about engineering from someone who paid a maid to clean their house, and sends their laundry out. But would you read their blog post on laundry tips? No - it's just as easy for you to send out your own laundry.
  - HarHarVeryFunny 8mo ago
    Err, no, the equivalent would be if the author had written an article about laundry, and how important it is to pay attention to all the details... then you realize the photo of his laundry still has a tag on it from the laundromat.
- badgersnake 8mo ago
  The author works on AI-powered Brand Agents built for marketers & publishers. That should be enough to tell you it’s not worth reading.
est 8mo ago
I think AI coding agents will quickly pick all the low hanging fruits and plateau. Everything can be vibed will be vibed until everyone hits a wall, where no docs to form corpus nor instructions for prompts exist. There are problems that are yet to be named, but how can you name things when humans aren't the one to experience patterns of a thought process? And naming things is one of the only two hard things in computer science
markus_zhang 8mo ago
I'm just going to sharpen up my hard skills so that I don't have to suck up on my soft skills. If that doesn't work out as I wish, well, since I already have a job, and I'm already 40+, and it looks like my company doesn't go away in a few years and we are so short-handed, I think I'm fine. Just to clarify that I'm not a jackass in real-life. In fact, I'm perfectly OK with all sorts of soft skills -- after all, my current position requires me to do so. But I just try to maintain a minimum level of soft skills to navigate the shoreline -- not interested to move up anyway.
- CrulesAll 8mo ago
  "I'm already 40+, and it looks like my company doesn't go away in a few years and we are so short-handed" FANG employee for over a decade quit her job, opened a consultancy, and sold back what she was doing to former clients of her company(and their clients). She sold back what she was having to do to make up for this short-handedness, and the incompetence of many of her former colleagues. She did it at 3-400 times the markup she was being paid while employed :) because they were time critical.
  - markus_zhang 8mo ago
    I’m not in FAANG and mine is just a small one which may not afford a lot, but yeah I totally agree it’s a good idea for a FAANG person.
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ironbound 8mo ago
Counter-point, a three person dev team displaces a multi million revenue company. Why have a slow human CEO when machines are faster..
notronic 8mo ago
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sgt 8mo ago
What about those professional software developers still refusing to use AI / LLMs? I know a couple and they're still churning out code completely 100% manually. Heck, I even know a guy who refuses to use an IDE with Java and the indenting is a mess, but he gets there.
- badgersnake 8mo ago
  Refusing to use them or trying them and not getting value? Honestly I’ve tried them all and they’re all shit unless you’re doing trivial stuff. Some of them don’t even do trivial stuff very well.
- tayo42 8mo ago
  How do you try them without paying?
HarHarVeryFunny 8mo ago
I thought this article was going to be about something else ... It is really about prompting and writing specs - the "soft" (but really "hard") skill of giving detailed specs to an LLM so it does what you want. I think the more important, truly soft, skill in the age of AI is going to be communicating with humans and demonstrating your value in communicating both vertically up and down and horizontally within your team. LLMs are becoming quite capable at the "autistic" skill of coding, but they are still horrible communicators, and don't communicate at all unless spoken to. This is where humans are currently, and maybe for a long time, irreplaceable - using our soft skills to interact with other humans and as always translate and refine fuzzy business requirements into the unforgiving language of the machine, whether that is carefully engineered LLM contexts, or machine code. As far as communication goes, I have to say that Gemini 3.0, great as it is, is starting to grate on me with it's sycophantic style and failure to just respond as requested rather than to blabber on about "next steps" that it is constantly trying to second guess from it's history. You can tell it to focus and just answer the question, but that only lasts for one or two conversational turns. One of Gemini's most annoying traits is to cheerfully and authoritatively give design advice, then when questioned admit (or rather tell, as if it were it's own insight) that this advice is catastrophically bad and will lead to a bad outcome, and without pause then tell you what you really should do, as if this is going to be any better. "You're absolutely right! You've just realized the inevitable hard truth that all designers come to! If you do [what I just told you to do], program performance will be terrible! Here is how you avoid that ... (gives more advice pulled out of ass, without any analysis of consequences)" It's getting old.
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rafinha 8mo ago
The classic "technically strong but lacking soft skills" unheard story about you through the office after your results.
mupuff1234 8mo ago
Counter point - If one person can now do the work of an entire team the level of communication skills required will actually be simplified. So now instead of needing to manage multiple stakeholders and expectations of 10 different middle managers you'll probably just have a 1:1 with a single person.
benttoothpaste 8mo ago
I've heard this "soft skills are the only skills that matter" thing throughout my entire career but these days this is indeed greatly amplified. Our CEO started sharing screenshots of his xitter/linkedin feeds and most of them contain wisdoms like "Opus 4.5 is better than 90% of talent". There is also longer form business fan fiction. It usually follows this template: there is a hero - a humble manager/sales person, and a villain - a cocky, nerdy software developer. The villain claims that some task is impossible or takes months to complete. Then the humble hero (equipped with Opus 4.5) completes the task in 2 hours. The villain is then humiliated/fired and everyone lives happily ever after. These posts definitely contribute to the declining morale among employees. Nobody goes "above and beyond" anymore - we just strictly doing the tickets and nothing more.
- echelon 8mo ago
  Two things can be true: - You can have a horrible CEO that doesn't value their employees and is trying to devalue labor. - AI coding tools can be incredible exoskeletons in the hands of skilled engineers and enable them to get much more work done. Perhaps the real "SaaS-killer" is innovation capital [1] realizing it can take advantage of the various forms of arbitrage and changing of the guards happening now, raise venture capital, and take on the old and slow management-driven businesses. If you've ever had the itch to fire your boss, now's the time. It's a hard path, there are way more hats to wear, but the dry powder is out there waiting to be deployed. [1] ICs in both senses of the acronym.
  - JohnnyMarcone 8mo ago
    It's also the fun path! Although I think we should acknowledge that most don't have the means to do this. For engineers with a high salary I would advise saving as much as possible so you have more agency.
- binary132 8mo ago
  Once upon a time a clever software engineer realized that engineering talent is the fuel which the business relies on to support its revenue growth, and management is for facilitating this process, while the CEO’s purpose is to be blamed when it doesn’t work out. He wrote a small bash script which replaced corporate leadership with a “quote of the day” generator and everyone lived happily ever after.
tagami 8mo ago
In education, I view them as life skills, durable skills.
mikewarot 8mo ago
Unless you're buried deep in an organization, the main value that programmers provide is to help translate the needs of a business into a program that, when compiled, creates a reliable artifact that, when executed, works reliably and is easy to use. Writing code is just how that happens, sometimes. Soft skills are essential to communication with the users and product managers.
pjmlp 8mo ago
This has never been the case for those of us doing consulting, soft skills are a must have requirement when dealing with customers on regular basis.
Animats 8mo ago
It won't help. LLMs are good at soft skills, too. There's a whole "AI girlfriend" industry, and it's quite successful.
- throw-the-towel 8mo ago
  LLMs are not good at soft skills, just the girlfriends you can get in this society are even worse.
  - luckylion 8mo ago
    I consider "understanding what people want when they well you" part of soft skills, and LLMs are good at that. I've know a few non-developers who use AI to solve the things they need. Nothing huge, it's not anything amazing, but what impressed me is how well the process works for them. They describe what they want in very vague terms with a lot of contradictions and in convoluted stream-of-thought paragraphs. But it mostly works, and LLMs produce something that's very close to what they want, and they get to their desired result with a few iterations.
  - steve1977 8mo ago
    So pretty similar to product owners or project managers in your average enterprise
  - oblio 8mo ago
    Speaking of skills: > girlfriends you can get in this society are even worse Skill issue. Also, unrealistic expectations. People are both afraid of doing the hard work to have meaningful relations and filtering out duds and also want the world from another human.
  - marcosdumay 8mo ago
    > the girlfriends you can get in this society are even worse WTF? Dehumanizing people into a collective, way to go. Do you expect to assimilate them, Borg style?
- deleted 8mo ago
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awesome_dude 8mo ago
My take: Businesses have valued "cohesion" over "correctness" for some time (at least the last 10 years of my career) with the thinking that they can always eventually get to a correct solution, but teams that aren't cohesive do not work toward the goal they fight amongst themselves until they tear themselves apart (as a former Python dev I have seen teams that have one or two members fight for MONTHS over which set of linters to use) I also want to say that the only source of "bugs" is misunderstandings - of what the technology does, what the business wants, or what the customer wants (two thirds of that is "soft skills"). We've created DDD to try and address one third of those potential issues, but we're not there yet.
la_fayette 8mo ago
The claim in the article that AI is good at writing code, is that claude code is written by claude code.
sennalen 8mo ago
Watch them
steve1977 8mo ago
> we won't be able to AI our way into better communication skills Why not? I always find these articles funny. There's someone almost triumphantly declaring that AI is able to take over the hard skills tasks from oh so dreaded engineers, but the authors can somehow not imagine that their soft skills - which are often they only ones they have - could be done by AI as well.
sublinear 8mo ago
Do we accuse AI of having poor soft skills when it doesn't do what we want? I think the problem is knowing how to bridge knowledge gaps. That just comes from experience and there are no shortcuts on either end of the gap. Empathy does matter a little bit, but to focus so much on it is plain neurotic. Consider how much less friction there is when the interactions can be kept brief. Everyone is already familiar with the various situations and problems that can arise (like on a sports team). That's pure hard skills, not soft skills. Posts like this are flamebait for the extreme ends of these gaps: stubborn mediocre programmers and arrogant dumb management.
brikym 8mo ago
"I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people, can't you understand that? WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!"
durandal1 8mo ago
I've had a long career in software and my conclusions is that if soft skills are valued over hard skills, the organization is already captured by talentless engineers and leaders. There are holdouts in the world, where execution is king, find those places and run away from soft skill fortresses. This is more true than even with LLM-amplified productivity.
- _ea1k 8mo ago
  +1 - I think this really needs to be emphasized more. Just like any relevant skills, soft skills are useful. It is great to build strength here. It is never a sign of health when they become the main thing.
- jayd16 8mo ago
  This is a bit confusing. Execution requires both soft and hard skills. I think you're conflating "soft skills have value" with an org run by bullshitters.
  - greesil 8mo ago
    Not conflating, the parent is saying it's correlated.
- mathgeek 8mo ago
  Like most of these binary statements, the truth is indeed somewhere in the middle. Software engineers don't require focus on getting beyond acceptable with soft skills. Software engineers who want to move into staff/managements/product/etc. need to focus on them.
- Lucasoato 8mo ago
  > There are holdouts in the world, where execution is king, find those places and run away from soft skill fortresses. And guess what do you need to execute? Both soft and hard skills. You'll not live long without both of them and this is even more true today. It's useless estimating the ratio between soft and hard skills without context, sometimes projects fail for one, sometimes for the other. The big truth is that as the markets get more competitive, the employee pool follows the same trend: it's not 2021 anymore, world has changed, great developers that have both hard and soft skills can be found in the market and it's up to a competent hiring team to find them.
simonw 8mo ago
DjangoCon has a policy to not use the term "soft skills" and instead classify them as "professional skills" - communication and collaboration and management and leadership. I think they're 100% right about that. There's nothing easy or soft about what gets classified as "soft skills".
casey2 8mo ago
Poppycock. If a software engineer truly solved a hard problem they they would be a billionaire overnight. Now that everyone has a assistant that can work 24/7, talk to customers, get requirements There is no excuse for neglecting hard skills. What this article calls "soft skills" is largely just experience which is often wrong in tech.
sharadov 8mo ago
I used to work with a brilliant asshole - he had this babyface but would constantly belittle his fellow engineers. Everyone hated him but the CEO loved him since he thought he was their golden ticket to the promised land. At some point he went with us to a shooting range for target practice, immediately after he developed a fascination for guns, he never threatened anyone, but one day he buys a Kevlar vest and tells all his fellow devs. The following Monday was his last day..
AIorNot 8mo ago
Me! me! I have people skills :) https://youtu.be/hNuu9CpdjIo?si=FkbWtFMKunwjxcen https://youtu.be/hNuu9CpdjIo?si=FkbWtFMKunwjxcen (Office Space)
nwmcsween 8mo ago
So, there is professional skills and then there is "soft skills" which at many places is a euphemism for political theatre. Nearly everyone I've ever met has professional skills; few can stomach "soft skills"
- mawadev 8mo ago
  Feels like soft skills are peddled as if developers don't have "enough" and it is a common assumption by nearly everyone that this is the case. I think of it in a similar way: the magnitude of soft skills you put on display is positively correlated to the difficulty of social interactions at that workplace. Navigating all the nuances, implies how complicated and maybe loaded that environment is. Do one "mistake" regarding social skills and you will face "consequences"?
gaanbal 8mo ago
when could we?
deleted 8mo ago
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class3shock 8mo ago
Has this ever been something you can ignore? You need to be able to interact with customers, communicate with other team members, mentor junior engineers, etc. I know there is the trope of the abrasive but technically genius engineer but no one wants to work with that person irl.
KellyCriterion 8mo ago
I remember a day at the office of a former job; there was one guy, the "chief developer", technically solid, but he was a pure a**** when interacting with others; it was quite known that he was a "difficult person". One day, I opened the door to another floor and he approached the opened door: I saw him with two things in his hands: the one was a Leitz folder, and in the other hand he had a cup of coffee - so full that the coffee was kept in the cup already only because of the surface tension of the liquid. I held the door opened, looked at him, a small smile and noded - he didnt show any reaction (not even think of a "thank you" or similar)
kunley 8mo ago
What about: tech managers can no longer hide their poor or nonexistent management skills.
coldtea 8mo ago
Many of us became software engineers precisely to neglect our soft skills (or lack thereof)
tanseydavid 8mo ago
A quote from one of my best managers "I don't think your biggest challenges on this project will be technical." This definitely helped me to have better perspective.
lumirth 8mo ago
I have always said this: life is other people. Jobs and employment are necessarily a reflection of the fact that we need each other to survive. We do not hunt the meat we consume, we did not deliver ourselves, and the vast majority of us won’t build the bed we die in. Soft skills were never optional.

230 points by quanwinn 8mo ago

juicytip 8mo ago

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RcouF1uZ4gsC 8mo ago

Thank Open Source and Free Software which commodified hard skills and pushed business to value them as zero.

marsven_422 8mo ago

[dead]

yapyap 8mo ago

You never really could. If you hear of a (very) succesful software engineer with horrid soft skills they’re a 1%er chance wise

commandlinefan 8mo ago
I’ve been hearing this since the 90’s.
- ambicapter 8mo ago
  I feel like it's a myth promoted by engineers with poor soft skills to justify themselves never learning said skills.
  - mawadev 8mo ago
    How do you learn soft skills? Maybe you have a point there
    - ambicapter 8mo ago
      Watching other people do it better than you, or reading about it and trying things yourself would be two ways I can think of.

anon946 8mo ago

The irony here is that universities are struggling to teach writing skills, due to massive cheating with AI.

LatencyKills 8mo ago
I mentor CS students at two local universities. The best students are using gen ai to enhance their learning and understanding (i.e. they use it as a tool instead of a crutch). The worst students are using it in attempt to “level the playing field” and are failing miserably. It is easy to determine if someone solved a problem using AI because they can’t explain or recreate “their” solution. Detecting cheating in essays is still far more difficult.
- HarHarVeryFunny 8mo ago
  You could probably detect essay cheating (AI written) in the exact same way by questioning the student about it - why did they organize the essay in this way, what was their motivation for focusing on X, or expressing something as Y... Of course anyone can concoct an explanation on the fly, but it should be obvious if they are speaking from the experience of having authored it or just coming up with a post-hoc rationalization. If they had AI write the essay, yet can still explain it as well as if they had written it themselves (ditto for code), then it would tend to indicate that they at least read it and thought about it, which I think should be more acceptable in a learning environment.
  - aleph_minus_one 8mo ago
    > You could probably detect essay cheating (AI written) in the exact same way by questioning the student about it - why did they organize the essay in this way, what was their motivation for focusing on X, or expressing something as Y... Of course anyone can concoct an explanation on the fly, but it should be obvious if they are speaking from the experience of having authored it or just coming up with a post-hoc rationalization. I wouldn't claim that I am bad at writing (at least in my native language, which is not English) - at least many colleagues say so. But I do insist that when writing I don't think that way. If I were to answer these question, my honest answers would be: "why did they organize the essay in this way": I just wrote down the thoughts that came to my mind, and then gave them some structure that seemed right. "what was their motivation for focusing on X": Either "because it felt right" or "I had to write at most x pages, and indeed it would have made sense to focus on more topics, so I focused on this arbitrary thing" So indeed I would claim that a lot of sensible reasons why things are this way actually are post-hoc rationalizations. :-)

joshuaisaact 8mo ago

This couldn't ring more true to me - I think one of the consequences of the rapid change in the profession we are seeing is that skills that typically were required only at more senior levels become required further down the stack. If I was a junior today, I'd be studying business impact, effective communication, project management, skills that were previously something you could get away with under-indexing on until senior+.

CrulesAll 8mo ago

Software 'engineers' are going to have learn the hard skills that they have gotten by without thus far. The ones who were never engineers in the first place will have to learn 'soft skills' because they are incapable. I believe @ Tsoding put it best: The only thing AI will do, in so far as coding goes, is to remove a lot of people who should never have been in it in the first place.

flitzofolov 8mo ago
Can you elaborate on this? What are some examples of skills you think are now essential, that prior have been taken for granted or obviated in some way?
- CrulesAll 8mo ago
  Beyond engineering itself, strictly computer engineering? How many coders have no idea what goes on behind an IDE. Have not even the slightest notion how a computer works. Who thinks building a computer means watching a Youtube video and buying ready made parts, putting them together, and then think they should be employed by NASA. To begin: Math, Linux, Devops, C, and Assembly. Not a youtube video. Not arithmetic. Learn to the point that you could be employed by any of the above as a senior. And don't fear failure. Keep doing it until you understand it.
  - pgwhalen 8mo ago
    I agree with your original post that the need for hard skills will persist, but I see it in the other direction: software engineers are going to have to get better at thinking in larger abstractions, not deeper understanding of the stack. Those who can only solve problems locally and repeat the patterns they've seen before rather than create new patterns from building blocks are the ones who are going to struggle.
    - CrulesAll 8mo ago
      "software engineers are going to have to get better at thinking in larger abstractions" ........Math was first on my list. I don't know how else to say that.

EGreg 8mo ago

As usual - the advice is essenially rats from a sinking ship all the way. “You all need to do this narrow thing to survive now”. 2016 to truckers: “Learn to code LOL” 2026 to coders: “Learn soft skills” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46436872 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46436872 Look, I personally am taking full advantage of exactly the skills described. I was the one who posted the above thing on HN showing how I am 20-50x more productive now, complete with a 4 hour speedrun video. I usually try not to just talk and point out current problems, but build solutions AND show (github, youtube) with specific details so you can watch it and apply it for yourself. But I am telling you: 1) most people will not adapt, so we will need UBI for those who don’t 2) eventually even those who adapt will be replaced too, so we will need UBI for everybody It is after all a thin layer that remains. I remember Kasparov proudly talked about how “centaurs” (human + machine working together) in chess were better than machines alone… until they weren’t, and human in the loop became a liability. But the problem is more widespread in the last 70 years. Just look around. Industry always tells the individual they can do some individual action downstream to clean up the mess they create upstream, and it is leading the entire planet into ruin: https://magarshak.com/blog/government-and-industry-distract-us-from-solving-systemic-problems/ https://magarshak.com/blog/government-and-industry-distract-... In fact, the human population in modern environments has been living large on an ecological credit card and the bill is coming due for our children, because all the “individual responsibility” stuff — where you can somehow diet, exercise and recycle your way out of things corporations do upstream — is all a gient lie and always has been. So the negative externalities just build up until the next generation won’t be able to ignore them anymore, but it could be too late. Whether that’als day zero for water in cities, or factory farms for meat with antiobiotic resistance, or fossil fuels and greenhouse gases to subsidize the car industry, or ubiqitous microplastic plastic pollution around thr world (yes, personal plastic recycling was just another such scam designed to keep you docile and not organize to force corporations to switch to biodegradeable materials.) The “anthoposcene” is seeing a decline in insects and all species of animal except humans and farm animals. Coral reefs are bleached, kelp forests and rainforests are decimated, and governments work with industry to eg allow Patagonian forests to be burned for new developments and then smokey the bear says “only YOU can prevent forest fires”. Think about it.

joshuaisaact 8mo ago

dangus 8mo ago

I would submit that this could be based on a stereotype that “coder = antisocial.” Why are we assuming that people who write code don’t have soft skills? The youngest generation who joined the profession are probably in it for the the salary versus the older generations who came from computer clubs and dungeons and dragons groups of the 1970s/1980s along with a culture where having a niche interest was socially ostracizing and uncool. I wonder if the youngest generation entering the profession is much more of a cross section of regular people?

lordnacho 8mo ago

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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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.

netdur 8mo ago

calculators doing a perfect job did not end accountants' jobs, it made it faster.

Etheryte 8mo ago
Not necessarily faster, but more easy for sure. There's plenty of stories of proficient abacus using accountants being faster than those using calculators. Those days are gone now though because a calculator is just so much easier to pick up.
kube-system 8mo ago
I don’t think that’s as good of an example as you think it is. “Computer” used to be a job title. It was entirely replaced by … drumroll … electronic computers, i.e. calculators. Technology doesn’t usually eliminate the need for a job output in general but it can sometimes shift the skills needed wildly.
ironbound 8mo ago
Your sort of paying them to understand the tax code that changes year to year tho

deleted 8mo ago

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marginalia_nu 8mo ago

The sort of people who have been able to neglect their soft skills are probably still going to be able to do so in the future. But those were always the extreme intelligence outliers, generational talent type figures. For most software engineers, neglect of soft skills have always been a career tarpit that leads nowhere you want to end up. Being able to navigate social settings and to communicate well is a force multiplier. For most people, it really doesn't matter how good you are if nobody understands what you are saying and you can't convince other people to buy into your ideas. You far more often see moderately successful charlatans that are all talk than successful people with awful communication skills. Of course if you're able to walk the talk, that's when you can really go places.

xhevahir 8mo ago
I think the author would say that the developer who is without soft skills won't merely be prevented from gaining desirable work. They'll be unable to keep a job, period.
- marginalia_nu 8mo ago
  Seems a pretty sketchy assertion, but regardless whether these people burn out in career purgatory at a java 8 feature factory moving jira tickets around for all of eternity, or they move on to something else entirely, it's probably not what they had in mind.
MattGaiser 8mo ago
The shift is from tarpit to unemployment. A Jira ticket processing dev still has use. Probably not for much longer.
- marginalia_nu 8mo ago
  Doubt we'll see that in the short term. Long term, possibly, especially if you add a financial crisis. Truth is most larger software development organizations could have even before LLMs downsized significantly and not lost much productivity. The X formerly known as Twitter did this and has been chugging along on a fraction on its original staff count. It's had some brand problems since its acquisition, but those are more due to Mr Musk's eccentricities and political ventures than the engineering team. The reason this hasn't happened to any wider degree is quarterly capitalism and institutional inertia. Looks weird to the investors if the organization claims to be doing well but is also slashing its employee count by 90%. Even if you bring a new CEO in that has these ideas, the org chart will fight it with tooth and nail as managers would lose reportees and clout. Consultancies in particular are incredibly inefficient by design since they make more money if they take more time and bring a larger headcount to the task: They don't sell productivity, but man hours. Hence horrors like SAFe.

lolive 8mo ago

Be careful, engineers, when interacting with soft skill experts not to join their reality distortion field where it’s all about coordination, alignment, bizness strategy, clever planning. Whereas the real stuffs are just implémentation details, quickly solved. In the end, they might convince you that 2+2=5.

CrulesAll 8mo ago
Wait until you try to explain basic concepts to such people! What's annoying is HR employing more of these people and not understanding why the dial does not move. What is baffling and infuriating is when such people are put in management. MBAs will destroy Western business eventually(those who tag an MBA onto a STEM qualification are not as bad but still infected.)
ambicapter 8mo ago
The trouble isn't that they would convince me with their reality distortion (they don't), the issue is that they are satisfied with their "progress" while I'm still asking crucial questions (which they ignore, b/c they don't see the importance).
- kube-system 8mo ago
  Part of the soft skills that are useful for a developer is being able to frame your crucial questions in a way that makes their importance relevant to their world.
  - hypeatei 8mo ago
    Perhaps soft skills are too squishy and/or broad of a term to be useful then. It seems like these discussions always go "maybe you, as the developer, just need to learn how to do soft skills properly?" in response to business types exhibiting an undesirable behavior. Sure, smooth talking and playing into someones personality might be more successful (albeit with a lot more hot air), but all of you are supposed to be working towards a goal. If someone gets hung up because you weren't smooth enough, I would think they're a bad faith actor who doesn't actually want to get something done.

Yokohiii 8mo ago

In a team environment, half of the job is communication. That LLMs do a better job if you know what you are asking for is old news. But to be honest, I usually don't care to write properly into an LLM prompt. An LLM will ignore grammar and form and just extract the essence. If I make an actual mistake I will notice quickly and fix it. If I'd send slack messages like that to an peer, they'd either mock me or simply think I am dumb. We also know the stories about people that use LLMs for any communication or anything they write. Probably for the exact reason that being lazy with writing is acceptable now. My call is that writing skill will decline, not improve. This could probably be the case for anything that people use LLMs as a proxy for.

ben_w 8mo ago
Broadly agree, but one point I think is (sadly) relevant: > That LLMs do a better job if you know what you are asking for is old news. Even a decade after Word Lens had demonstrated augmented reality live translation through a smartphone camera, I was amazing people by showing them the same feature in Google Translate. Similar anecdotes about Shakuntala Devi, even in 2018 I was seeing claims about her mental arithmetic beating a supercomputer (claims that ignored that this happened in 1977 and the computer was already obsolete at the time), even though my mid-2013 MacBook Air could not only beat her by a factor of 150 million, it could also train an AI to read handwritten numbers from scratch in 0.225 seconds, and then perform inference (read numbers) at just over 6,629 digits per second*. You say "old news", I say this discussion will be on repeat even in the early 2030s. And possibly even the 2060s. * Uses an old version of python, you'll need to fix it up accordingly: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2018/03/16-10.44.18.html https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2018/03/16-10.44.18.html

shevy-java 8mo ago

> Today, I use Claude Code for almost all non-trivial programming tasks and have spent $500+ on it just last December. Truthfully, I don't want to get advice from people who become addicted to AI, sorry. The money investment that person did, already leaves me with tons of questions.

echelon 8mo ago
> Truthfully, I don't want to get advice from people who become addicted to AI, sorry. If you sleep on this, these people are going to take your job. I've been writing serious systems code for 15 years. Systems that handled billions of dollars of transaction volume a day and whose hourly outages cost billions of dollars. These are systems you have to design carefully. Active-active, beyond five nines reliable. I'm telling you AI is extremely beneficial even in this segment of the market. The value prop is undeniable. I'm easily getting twice my workload done with AI, and I'm not even leveraging the full extent of the tools. I've only just started to do more than fancy tab-autocomplete. This is going to be a huge shift in our industry, and I would brace for impact.
- sph 8mo ago
  I don’t want to do twice my workload. I’m old enough to have learned that the faster and more efficient you are, the more demands they pile on you, and the net result is more stress, more expectations for the same pay. AI doesn’t solve unreasonable demands, shifting requirements and looming deadlines, does it? And still, writing code is not even the bottleneck, the thinking, meeting stakeholders, figuring out technical problems is. What would I do with a machine that spits out bad code. I guess I’m not cut out for a field where the only metric that counts is how many tickets and lines of code one can churn out in an hour any more.
  - gtowey 8mo ago
    In my 20+ years in the tech industry, the most important thing I have learned is that writing code is the least significant part of being a software engineer. You write code once, but then it's modified endlessly. Supporting and using and improving the code is the majority of the work. LLMs are terrible for that. They tend to write code that isnt easy to read and modify. They don't plan for future use cases. They often paint themselves into a corner with successive modifications, and lose context as the project grows. Don't worry about your job just yet. We are a long long way from replacing people.

karczex 8mo ago

So I opened this article to find out at the very beginning, that author put's a lot of money to AI providers... So probably also used it to write this article. So, according to the rule "text which is not worth of spending time on writing is also no worth of reading" I closed it.

pavel_lishin 8mo ago
I found out that the author of a blog post paid a maid to clean their house, and sends their laundry out. Therefore, the blog post was written by the maid, or one of the laundromat employees. So I closed it.
- ambicapter 8mo ago
  false equivalence
- rafterydj 8mo ago
  That's a false equivalence. You might read a blog post about engineering from someone who paid a maid to clean their house, and sends their laundry out. But would you read their blog post on laundry tips? No - it's just as easy for you to send out your own laundry.
- HarHarVeryFunny 8mo ago
  Err, no, the equivalent would be if the author had written an article about laundry, and how important it is to pay attention to all the details... then you realize the photo of his laundry still has a tag on it from the laundromat.
badgersnake 8mo ago
The author works on AI-powered Brand Agents built for marketers & publishers. That should be enough to tell you it’s not worth reading.

est 8mo ago

I think AI coding agents will quickly pick all the low hanging fruits and plateau. Everything can be vibed will be vibed until everyone hits a wall, where no docs to form corpus nor instructions for prompts exist. There are problems that are yet to be named, but how can you name things when humans aren't the one to experience patterns of a thought process? And naming things is one of the only two hard things in computer science

markus_zhang 8mo ago

I'm just going to sharpen up my hard skills so that I don't have to suck up on my soft skills. If that doesn't work out as I wish, well, since I already have a job, and I'm already 40+, and it looks like my company doesn't go away in a few years and we are so short-handed, I think I'm fine. Just to clarify that I'm not a jackass in real-life. In fact, I'm perfectly OK with all sorts of soft skills -- after all, my current position requires me to do so. But I just try to maintain a minimum level of soft skills to navigate the shoreline -- not interested to move up anyway.

CrulesAll 8mo ago
"I'm already 40+, and it looks like my company doesn't go away in a few years and we are so short-handed" FANG employee for over a decade quit her job, opened a consultancy, and sold back what she was doing to former clients of her company(and their clients). She sold back what she was having to do to make up for this short-handedness, and the incompetence of many of her former colleagues. She did it at 3-400 times the markup she was being paid while employed :) because they were time critical.
- markus_zhang 8mo ago
  I’m not in FAANG and mine is just a small one which may not afford a lot, but yeah I totally agree it’s a good idea for a FAANG person.

deleted 8mo ago

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ironbound 8mo ago

Counter-point, a three person dev team displaces a multi million revenue company. Why have a slow human CEO when machines are faster..

notronic 8mo ago

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sgt 8mo ago

What about those professional software developers still refusing to use AI / LLMs? I know a couple and they're still churning out code completely 100% manually. Heck, I even know a guy who refuses to use an IDE with Java and the indenting is a mess, but he gets there.

badgersnake 8mo ago
Refusing to use them or trying them and not getting value? Honestly I’ve tried them all and they’re all shit unless you’re doing trivial stuff. Some of them don’t even do trivial stuff very well.
tayo42 8mo ago
How do you try them without paying?

HarHarVeryFunny 8mo ago

I thought this article was going to be about something else ... It is really about prompting and writing specs - the "soft" (but really "hard") skill of giving detailed specs to an LLM so it does what you want. I think the more important, truly soft, skill in the age of AI is going to be communicating with humans and demonstrating your value in communicating both vertically up and down and horizontally within your team. LLMs are becoming quite capable at the "autistic" skill of coding, but they are still horrible communicators, and don't communicate at all unless spoken to. This is where humans are currently, and maybe for a long time, irreplaceable - using our soft skills to interact with other humans and as always translate and refine fuzzy business requirements into the unforgiving language of the machine, whether that is carefully engineered LLM contexts, or machine code. As far as communication goes, I have to say that Gemini 3.0, great as it is, is starting to grate on me with it's sycophantic style and failure to just respond as requested rather than to blabber on about "next steps" that it is constantly trying to second guess from it's history. You can tell it to focus and just answer the question, but that only lasts for one or two conversational turns. One of Gemini's most annoying traits is to cheerfully and authoritatively give design advice, then when questioned admit (or rather tell, as if it were it's own insight) that this advice is catastrophically bad and will lead to a bad outcome, and without pause then tell you what you really should do, as if this is going to be any better. "You're absolutely right! You've just realized the inevitable hard truth that all designers come to! If you do [what I just told you to do], program performance will be terrible! Here is how you avoid that ... (gives more advice pulled out of ass, without any analysis of consequences)" It's getting old.

deleted 8mo ago

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rafinha 8mo ago

The classic "technically strong but lacking soft skills" unheard story about you through the office after your results.

mupuff1234 8mo ago

Counter point - If one person can now do the work of an entire team the level of communication skills required will actually be simplified. So now instead of needing to manage multiple stakeholders and expectations of 10 different middle managers you'll probably just have a 1:1 with a single person.

benttoothpaste 8mo ago

I've heard this "soft skills are the only skills that matter" thing throughout my entire career but these days this is indeed greatly amplified. Our CEO started sharing screenshots of his xitter/linkedin feeds and most of them contain wisdoms like "Opus 4.5 is better than 90% of talent". There is also longer form business fan fiction. It usually follows this template: there is a hero - a humble manager/sales person, and a villain - a cocky, nerdy software developer. The villain claims that some task is impossible or takes months to complete. Then the humble hero (equipped with Opus 4.5) completes the task in 2 hours. The villain is then humiliated/fired and everyone lives happily ever after. These posts definitely contribute to the declining morale among employees. Nobody goes "above and beyond" anymore - we just strictly doing the tickets and nothing more.

echelon 8mo ago
Two things can be true: - You can have a horrible CEO that doesn't value their employees and is trying to devalue labor. - AI coding tools can be incredible exoskeletons in the hands of skilled engineers and enable them to get much more work done. Perhaps the real "SaaS-killer" is innovation capital [1] realizing it can take advantage of the various forms of arbitrage and changing of the guards happening now, raise venture capital, and take on the old and slow management-driven businesses. If you've ever had the itch to fire your boss, now's the time. It's a hard path, there are way more hats to wear, but the dry powder is out there waiting to be deployed. [1] ICs in both senses of the acronym.
- JohnnyMarcone 8mo ago
  It's also the fun path! Although I think we should acknowledge that most don't have the means to do this. For engineers with a high salary I would advise saving as much as possible so you have more agency.
binary132 8mo ago
Once upon a time a clever software engineer realized that engineering talent is the fuel which the business relies on to support its revenue growth, and management is for facilitating this process, while the CEO’s purpose is to be blamed when it doesn’t work out. He wrote a small bash script which replaced corporate leadership with a “quote of the day” generator and everyone lived happily ever after.

tagami 8mo ago

In education, I view them as life skills, durable skills.

mikewarot 8mo ago

Unless you're buried deep in an organization, the main value that programmers provide is to help translate the needs of a business into a program that, when compiled, creates a reliable artifact that, when executed, works reliably and is easy to use. Writing code is just how that happens, sometimes. Soft skills are essential to communication with the users and product managers.

pjmlp 8mo ago

This has never been the case for those of us doing consulting, soft skills are a must have requirement when dealing with customers on regular basis.

Animats 8mo ago

It won't help. LLMs are good at soft skills, too. There's a whole "AI girlfriend" industry, and it's quite successful.

throw-the-towel 8mo ago
LLMs are not good at soft skills, just the girlfriends you can get in this society are even worse.
- luckylion 8mo ago
  I consider "understanding what people want when they well you" part of soft skills, and LLMs are good at that. I've know a few non-developers who use AI to solve the things they need. Nothing huge, it's not anything amazing, but what impressed me is how well the process works for them. They describe what they want in very vague terms with a lot of contradictions and in convoluted stream-of-thought paragraphs. But it mostly works, and LLMs produce something that's very close to what they want, and they get to their desired result with a few iterations.
- steve1977 8mo ago
  So pretty similar to product owners or project managers in your average enterprise
- oblio 8mo ago
  Speaking of skills: > girlfriends you can get in this society are even worse Skill issue. Also, unrealistic expectations. People are both afraid of doing the hard work to have meaningful relations and filtering out duds and also want the world from another human.
- marcosdumay 8mo ago
  > the girlfriends you can get in this society are even worse WTF? Dehumanizing people into a collective, way to go. Do you expect to assimilate them, Borg style?
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awesome_dude 8mo ago

My take: Businesses have valued "cohesion" over "correctness" for some time (at least the last 10 years of my career) with the thinking that they can always eventually get to a correct solution, but teams that aren't cohesive do not work toward the goal they fight amongst themselves until they tear themselves apart (as a former Python dev I have seen teams that have one or two members fight for MONTHS over which set of linters to use) I also want to say that the only source of "bugs" is misunderstandings - of what the technology does, what the business wants, or what the customer wants (two thirds of that is "soft skills"). We've created DDD to try and address one third of those potential issues, but we're not there yet.

la_fayette 8mo ago

The claim in the article that AI is good at writing code, is that claude code is written by claude code.

sennalen 8mo ago

Watch them

steve1977 8mo ago

> we won't be able to AI our way into better communication skills Why not? I always find these articles funny. There's someone almost triumphantly declaring that AI is able to take over the hard skills tasks from oh so dreaded engineers, but the authors can somehow not imagine that their soft skills - which are often they only ones they have - could be done by AI as well.

sublinear 8mo ago

Do we accuse AI of having poor soft skills when it doesn't do what we want? I think the problem is knowing how to bridge knowledge gaps. That just comes from experience and there are no shortcuts on either end of the gap. Empathy does matter a little bit, but to focus so much on it is plain neurotic. Consider how much less friction there is when the interactions can be kept brief. Everyone is already familiar with the various situations and problems that can arise (like on a sports team). That's pure hard skills, not soft skills. Posts like this are flamebait for the extreme ends of these gaps: stubborn mediocre programmers and arrogant dumb management.

brikym 8mo ago

"I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people, can't you understand that? WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!"

durandal1 8mo ago

I've had a long career in software and my conclusions is that if soft skills are valued over hard skills, the organization is already captured by talentless engineers and leaders. There are holdouts in the world, where execution is king, find those places and run away from soft skill fortresses. This is more true than even with LLM-amplified productivity.

_ea1k 8mo ago
+1 - I think this really needs to be emphasized more. Just like any relevant skills, soft skills are useful. It is great to build strength here. It is never a sign of health when they become the main thing.
jayd16 8mo ago
This is a bit confusing. Execution requires both soft and hard skills. I think you're conflating "soft skills have value" with an org run by bullshitters.
- greesil 8mo ago
  Not conflating, the parent is saying it's correlated.
mathgeek 8mo ago
Like most of these binary statements, the truth is indeed somewhere in the middle. Software engineers don't require focus on getting beyond acceptable with soft skills. Software engineers who want to move into staff/managements/product/etc. need to focus on them.
Lucasoato 8mo ago
> There are holdouts in the world, where execution is king, find those places and run away from soft skill fortresses. And guess what do you need to execute? Both soft and hard skills. You'll not live long without both of them and this is even more true today. It's useless estimating the ratio between soft and hard skills without context, sometimes projects fail for one, sometimes for the other. The big truth is that as the markets get more competitive, the employee pool follows the same trend: it's not 2021 anymore, world has changed, great developers that have both hard and soft skills can be found in the market and it's up to a competent hiring team to find them.

simonw 8mo ago

DjangoCon has a policy to not use the term "soft skills" and instead classify them as "professional skills" - communication and collaboration and management and leadership. I think they're 100% right about that. There's nothing easy or soft about what gets classified as "soft skills".

casey2 8mo ago

Poppycock. If a software engineer truly solved a hard problem they they would be a billionaire overnight. Now that everyone has a assistant that can work 24/7, talk to customers, get requirements There is no excuse for neglecting hard skills. What this article calls "soft skills" is largely just experience which is often wrong in tech.

sharadov 8mo ago

I used to work with a brilliant asshole - he had this babyface but would constantly belittle his fellow engineers. Everyone hated him but the CEO loved him since he thought he was their golden ticket to the promised land. At some point he went with us to a shooting range for target practice, immediately after he developed a fascination for guns, he never threatened anyone, but one day he buys a Kevlar vest and tells all his fellow devs. The following Monday was his last day..

AIorNot 8mo ago

Me! me! I have people skills :) https://youtu.be/hNuu9CpdjIo?si=FkbWtFMKunwjxcen https://youtu.be/hNuu9CpdjIo?si=FkbWtFMKunwjxcen (Office Space)

nwmcsween 8mo ago

So, there is professional skills and then there is "soft skills" which at many places is a euphemism for political theatre. Nearly everyone I've ever met has professional skills; few can stomach "soft skills"

mawadev 8mo ago
Feels like soft skills are peddled as if developers don't have "enough" and it is a common assumption by nearly everyone that this is the case. I think of it in a similar way: the magnitude of soft skills you put on display is positively correlated to the difficulty of social interactions at that workplace. Navigating all the nuances, implies how complicated and maybe loaded that environment is. Do one "mistake" regarding social skills and you will face "consequences"?

gaanbal 8mo ago

when could we?

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class3shock 8mo ago

Has this ever been something you can ignore? You need to be able to interact with customers, communicate with other team members, mentor junior engineers, etc. I know there is the trope of the abrasive but technically genius engineer but no one wants to work with that person irl.

KellyCriterion 8mo ago

I remember a day at the office of a former job; there was one guy, the "chief developer", technically solid, but he was a pure a**** when interacting with others; it was quite known that he was a "difficult person". One day, I opened the door to another floor and he approached the opened door: I saw him with two things in his hands: the one was a Leitz folder, and in the other hand he had a cup of coffee - so full that the coffee was kept in the cup already only because of the surface tension of the liquid. I held the door opened, looked at him, a small smile and noded - he didnt show any reaction (not even think of a "thank you" or similar)

kunley 8mo ago

What about: tech managers can no longer hide their poor or nonexistent management skills.

coldtea 8mo ago

Many of us became software engineers precisely to neglect our soft skills (or lack thereof)

tanseydavid 8mo ago

A quote from one of my best managers "I don't think your biggest challenges on this project will be technical." This definitely helped me to have better perspective.

lumirth 8mo ago

I have always said this: life is other people. Jobs and employment are necessarily a reflection of the fact that we need each other to survive. We do not hunt the meat we consume, we did not deliver ourselves, and the vast majority of us won’t build the bed we die in. Soft skills were never optional.