alt Hacker NewsI'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.
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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.
+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.
This feels like a false dichotomy. You can be superior to those conceptual camps by building an array of skills.
This is even obvious to heavily technically minded people, who lament how one kind of engineer would benefit from stronger grasp of other domains. Communication skills, understanding of how to exist within social structures, and all those “soft skills” have the power to multiply the value of the technical skills.
My sense is that the loudest proponents for devaluing soft skills are those who are bad at them and want a moat rather than having to work at them to compete.
> There are holdouts in the world, where execution is king
Could you name a few with salaries at least somewhat near FAANG’s?
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.
In most cases, the hard part is getting a bunch of people to work together on a problem and not have it turn out complete shit.
It's never easy for a bunch of people, each with differing and partially-overlapping conceptualisations of some domain, to coordinate correctly.
The human problems don't really go away. It requires an insane amount of "context" that would overwhelm any current AI.
> 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.