| "Soft skills are vital for team lead and product management but being able to write a good email and butter up your superiors isn't too important for other developers." No, unless they work very individually. Especially not I freaking agile situation - or any other situation where developers cooperate closely or have to communicate with customer. Thinking that soft skills don't matter in team tend to be entitled. A developer without soft skills means that all the other developers need to use twice as much soft skills whenever dealing with him. It may mean everybody else having to defend against constant attempts for micromanagement and bullying. It means longer meetings, because that person does not read situation despite being explained it already three times. It means feature being implemented badly, because that person can't understand how someone different might want it work differently then he would prefer. It means major temper tamtrum cause team did not agreed exactly on his coding style. It means days or hour long arguments about petty differences. It means dude claims other people "produced bad code" and team members being accused of incompetence or mocked in front of managemnt instead of being asked why they did things certain way - all the why the dude act puzzled when they are pissed when they find out their solution is actually right (but management is not there already). It means juniors afraid to open mounth. "This is a product manager's job and if you're pushing that job onto developers then it's almost guaranteed to interfere with their other work and to be done poorly." Unless the product manager completely micromanages the team, which tend to be ressented and tend to push out more experienced people, you have a level of autonomy around tasks prioritisation. If you can't do it, pm will do that for you, but you will be considered higher maintenance and less capable. |