alt Hacker NewsIt 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.
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> Most of my peers would rather work with brilliant jerk than a friendly average person
I worked with one of these. Every interaction was miserable and stomach-turning. He slowed the project down in a number of ways. A friendly average person would have been a net gain.
> Most of my peers would rather work with brilliant jerk than a friendly average person.
I think you need to be more specific than just "avert" the trope without elaborating. Others have commented how a brilliant jerk can slow a project down, but I get the impression that you are thinking of someone who is not sociable, not interested in business goals, very direct and perhaps even pessimistic about others' ability, but hand them a technical task and they can deliver exceptional results. This is opposed to, say, someone who is sociable but can't deliver anything without constant attention or handholding.
> 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.
If you can isolate the brilliant jerk to do something that needs very little coordination with others, that can work.
But at least where I've worked, there wasn't much standalone work like that.
>Most of my peers would rather work with brilliant jerk than a friendly average person.
If that’s true, you work somewhere very strange. Almost everyone hates dealing with assholes.