> 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.

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.

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.

Yes this is how it is. The whole corporate world has been overtaken by feminism. Making the best software takes second place below agreeing with your superiors. It's not good.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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?

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

Even before AI, there was tremendous pressure on developers for NOT going above and beyond.

I have been in far too many situations where a developer had an idea or a prototype it was blocked by a product manager on the grounds of it not being their idea. As a technical manager you then have to burn political capital just to get people to fucking collaborate.

I've also seen way too many situations where developers must do the actual PM gruntwork where the PM wants to pretend they are some kind of svengali tastemaker figure.

Have this for a few years and the psychological safety of any developer is in shambles.

Those environments need to be fucking burned to the ground.

One just needs to survive one layoff round to learn that going above and beyond is useless, everyone gets shown the door regardless of the performance.

That is one reason why companies don't like seniors, we know their tricks.

Companies have forgotten the value of morale. In this particular sense, AI hype has been very successful in demolishing morale, creating burnouts and overall decreasing value of everyone. Now everyone at the company can build everything in 2 hours, or so I am told.

> 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.

I do have the impression that many programmers are much more resistant to bullshitting, and love to call out the mistakes when confronted with bullshit. Getting into management, on the other hand, means believing in instead of fighting lots bullshit.

So, of course the mentioned CEO gets lots of such stories in his xitter/linkedin feeds; CEOs are not insanely eager to comment on such stories why the premises are wrong, and by which dirty tricks this manipulates people. Rather, by climbing up the company ranks, they actively had to believe in more and more fairy tables (or bullshit); if they are too resistant to the brainwashing that they have to believe in, they will stop climbing ranks.

> 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.

I think those posts exist in a bubble. They only escaped the bubble because someone wanted to use them once over to unite a different group of people against a different set of bad guys, ironically continuing the cycle. This time it’s devs loathing management instead of management loathing devs.

All of the great people I’ve worked with don’t play any of these games at all. They know it’s a sideshow of engagement bait and content generated with a goal of being controversial, not truthful.

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.

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.

Best to also avoid people with LSP and debugger addiction.

Sensible. This article is another AI hype angle. The author works on an AI agent platform for marketing, of course he wants to hype it.

> 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.

Its never about the soft skill experts being able to convince the engineers, the challenge if any, is always about them being able to convince the "leadership"

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).

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.)

> [people without soft skills] were always the extreme intelligence outliers

This is a B-player myth.

High intelligence makes you better at soft skills. People are complex, and being good at soft skills takes intelligence, intelligence to intuit the importance and see the patterns of soft skills.

It is true that if you have high skills that a business needs, you can choose to ignore many internal norms of dress or etiquette.

And also as your status goes up, the more you don't need to care about signaling, and some people do counter-signalling. I always think of this: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/lifestyle/article-9233455/Prince...

Unfortunately it is also true that some people think that acting badly will give them cred (reversing the causality that having cred permits bad behaviour). Was Sam-Bankman-Fried acting that cryptic appearance? Do executives also model their behaviour by rewatching The Apprentice or Gordon Ramsay?

Disclaimer: That's mostly my personal opinion, from watching people smarter than I. Then again I'm no genius, nor do I win status games, so perhaps I'm just ignorant. I've definitely seen some less talented try and put on an act leading to a pratfall. Also many of the smartest people I know left school at 15.

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.

The shift is from tarpit to unemployment. A Jira ticket processing dev still has use. Probably not for much longer.

> 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.

This is just not true. Lack of soft skill never implied high intelligence, it was always and is just lack of soft skills. Some people without them are otherwise highly intelligent, others are just normal or even weaker then average.

> 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.

I would argue that this is consequence of management that does NOT have soft skills. People write a lot about soft skills of engineers and simply assume management has them. They do not always, yes they then end up being bad managers ... and charlatans doing good is usually consequence of bad management without those actual people skills. Soft skills are not just about coming across nice, they are also about being able to be assertive, being able to recognize charlatans or toxic personalities and being able to deal with them (which is not the same as enabling them).

The author works on AI-powered Brand Agents built for marketers & publishers. That should be enough to tell you it’s not worth reading.

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.

LLMs are not good at soft skills, just the girlfriends you can get in this society are even worse.

"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.

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.

I think this is kinda sad. I always thought coding was so beautiful for creating a (good paying) job for socially awkward people on the spectrum who pre-coding was considered dorks and went into idk what but probably some unsatisfying job. It seems like we're heading back to that which makes me sad and worried about the highly functioning autistic population.

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?

I hope this too but it's not a given, IMO. Previously people without technical chops failed quickly by being unable to deliver working code, now they can deliver mediocre code with the damage only becoming clear years later. It breaks the "can deliver code --> good technical ability" proxy and even after the initial damage wave, it's unclear if we will find a better proxy.

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.

Your sort of paying them to understand the tax code that changes year to year tho

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.

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.

I’ve been hearing this since the 90’s.

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

I may have misread your comment, but I don't think soft skills are a 'narrow thing' at all. Effective communication, building trust, bringing people along with you - these are fundamental to being an effective human, not some niche pivot.