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.

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hypeatei 7 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	kube-system 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Soft skills are broad in scope, for sure. But I’m not talking about “smooth talking” here; in response to the above example —- where engineering is asking questions that that the business things had not answered because they are presumably “unimportant” —- there is almost certainly a communication breakdown happening. Likely, one of the following is happening: * The questions are important to the business but engineering has failed to articulate why getting the answers are critical to the business. (Some engineers have a tendency to describe problems in the scope of how it affects their own job or task, but neglect the larger picture or fail to articulate any consequences) * The questions actually aren’t important for the business to answer and the engineer fails to understand how their task supports the goals of the business * The questions are important but they cannot be answered by the business. The engineer might need to gather more information before to generate actionable questions, or maybe the questions should be answered by engineering themselves.