[caseydurfee]

Are you sure the jobs that rely on soft skills and experience are more routine than other jobs? What experience do you have to support that?

I've found that once you throw humans into the mix, nothing is routine. I think CS schools do their grads a huge disservice by creating the expectation that the coding is the hard part.

There are a lot of people who can reverse a linked list who can't coordinate a huge project, or build a product from the ground up that people care about. If those are soft skills (implying they're less challenging to pick up), why do most engineers only develop them after they're pretty skilled technically?

In my experience, it's not because they're forced to in order to make up for declining mental horsepower. It's because what you're calling the "hard skills" have become routine to them, and they want to do harder things than they can accomplish as an individual contributor. They want to do work that's less routine.

Why label soft skills as "not thinking"? Humans are way more complex than computers.

[timwaagh]

For me not everything needs to be labelled thinking to be valuable. I do not know how much money beyonce makes but i know its a lot. I never implied that soft skills are easy to pick up. in fact for some people they are nearly impossible to learn.