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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

>>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.

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.

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.

Often it means being a sociopath

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.