The recent trend toward replacing technical acumen with "soft skills" is disturbing.<p>Let's dispense with a strawman: of course interacting with other people is necessary. But there are lots of people out there who said the "tech stuff" is easy and it's the coordination and empathy and stuff that's the real challenge. That's a dangerous perspective no matter which of the two ways you interpret it.<p>One interpretation is that you really don't think that technical quality is important. In this case, you'll end up getting complacent on quality, ship crap, and open yourself up to competition. You'll be in good company if you go this route: it's part of the reason big companies inevitably decay and get outcompeted by smaller, newer ones. (Notice how a lot of this "soft skills only" crap comes from big companies with products having enough inertia to last a while at a low quality level?)<p>The other interpretation is most insidious: you do recognize that technical excellence matters, but want to redirect credit to non-technical managers. This phenomenon is a <i>huge</i> problem outside tech; it goes back at least as far as Edison. We shouldn't be in a hurry to import this problem into our own field.<p>The truth is that in our field, there's a wide distribution of skill levels, and some technical problems go from "impossible" to "routine" once your technical people pass a certain skill and quality bar. Soft skills do not get you over this quality bar. Actual technical knowledge does.
Given many folks use tech to escape real-world interaction with messy, untrustworthy and corrupt people, finding their fantasy world in getting awesome things done, I doubt the hard skills will be replaced by soft ones. This is actually a symptom of sociopathic tendencies taking over tech which is a marker for "dark ages" coming, and neutralizing any progress coming from tech. The sociopaths finally figured out tech and will use it to enforce their agendas to detriment of most of us as we will be forced to spend our time on things we don't believe in and lie to each other we do meaningful things for betterment of humanity, which we won't. All large corps are becoming politically loaded places where one expression of "wrongthink" eclipses any achievements an individual did in the past, nuking future career. As sociopaths can't really compete on hard skills, they push soft-skill, touchy-feely agendas, identified as weak spots of techies that can't handle them reasonably in many cases. Oh, you achieved this awesome stuff that grew company by $100M? Well, you still don't smile at everyone, this fresh grad thinks you don't appreciate their Harvardness, please get better at this or no promotions/bonuses for you!
While I broadly agree with the author's characterization and summary of the importance of "real" soft skills, that seems to be a tiny slice of how the term is used. I've seen discussions of soft skills cover a ridiculously broad assortment of actual skills, cultural sensitivities, in-group identity behaviors, personality traits, and neurological aptitudes. Without being a lot clearer about the scope, I think there's a real risk of a "soft skills are real and important" position mutating into "if I don't like somebody it's just because they didn't work hard enough, not because there's anything strange about my expectations".
tl; dr:<p>1. Author observes that he's witnessed a lot of emotional backlash to the suggestion that soft skills may outweigh hard skills in tech; suggests the emotionality of the reaction is indicative that engineers worry it just may be true.<p>2. Justifies the importance of soft skills by citing personal experience of teams of 100s+ people needing to be coordinated<p>3. Proposes that a [software] system's interaction with the outside world is a larger problem than the system itself [i.e. UX tougher than code]<p>4. Offers a metric to assess management by: if people dislike managers then those managers must have very low soft-skills. Proposes the traditional approach to management is a large failure in tech.<p>5. Describes soft-skills but gives no hard examples<p>6. Proposes creating vocabulary to represent soft skills such as requirement-gathering so that people can care more about these skills<p>---<p>My aside: I think 1/2 largely depend on the product, some products are almost entirely technical (alpha go, bitcoin), we'll only ever reach agreement by not oversimplifying the question.<p>I agree on 4, but I really think 5 is crucial. I think everybody has a very different idea of what "Soft skills" are and how well other people think they do at those skills. For example, I think somebody who creates laughter at work is a huge asset, others may not.
I appreciate the content of the article but I can't help picking up a dose of disrespect from the author towards exactly the collection of people he is trying to persuade.
I wish the piece had been better edited to lead with a definitions of soft/hard skills, then a topic sentence for the thesis, then supporting arguments. There may be some good nuggets here, but it just feels like there's just rambling on and on.
> The fact is that the kinds of “soft skills” we’re talking about aren’t the ones that come for free to anybody<p>I wish that a certain ex-Googler could have been educated in these skills rather than being shown the door.
I think it is time to post a link to The Night Watch again.... [0]<p>0. <a href="http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/thenightwatch.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/thenightwatch...</a>
Is sound engineering judgement a technical skill or a soft skill? How about the ability to articulate that judgement, so as to explain to others that one set of choices is better than the alternatives, and persuade them to agree?
I don't understand what are these soft skills the author is talking about. To me, it seems like he's talking about manipulating and deceiving people. Why is it good for a manager to be skilled at creating the impression that he/she respects his reports?