[bitL]

Soft skills are often used as beating sticks on techies by the rest of populace; it's the usual "socially-clueless nerd" song we hear all the time, like we couldn't take care of ourselves. Don't tell me you didn't notice people that lack skills needed for their jobs diverting their attention to their strong aspects, like being "political", and trying to hack other people to believe that their skills are what actually matters instead of hard skills coming from years of practice and suffering. It's like the oldest play in the book, divert attention from your own shortcoming and negate what is important. Due to "nerds being clueless", it actually often works, which is sad.

[nostrademons]

"diverting their attention to their strong aspects"

"instead of hard skills coming from years of practice and suffering"

Kinda like you did there? ;-)

Anyway, this is an essential soft skill to have, and one that I suspect more techies exercise than they give themselves credit for. But the response to it is pretty simple: "Alright, if this organization doesn't value the skillset I have, I'll go work for an organization that does, doing a favor for both you, me, and that new organization." After all, why waste resources on something you don't need? The whole point of a market economy is to self-organize so that everyone gets the maximum amount of value out of their skills & talents.

I've pulled this card a couple times (not even as a negotiation tool, but because I honestly wanted to know if I should be spending my time on something else) and gotten back a "No, no, this is actually really important to us, please don't leave or stop doing it."

[abusoufiyan]

What nonsense, if anything it's techies who are themselves promoting this theory after years of working in the tech industry

Soft skills are important especially in programming. Open source projects for example, live and die by how much and how well they can engage their community, an inherently soft skill.

[wwweston]

So there's truth to this -- I've certainly seen over and over again how non-technical people often try to put people with technical skills in a box (as if we can't have other skills), and it also can be frustrating to watch people stake out some territory as where they add value when you know the activity they're engaged in isn't particularly difficult and they're not bringing outlier skills to it.

But one of the things I figured out a while back is that even jobs that aren't particularly hard sometimes still need dedicated time and attention. Division of labor can help with that. And if you try doing one of the "easy"/soft jobs for a while, you might find that it requires a certain set of subtle skills that don't all come naturally to you.

For example, I tried being an account/project manager and sometimes-front-end-dev for a startup years ago. And I found out really quick that the former is (partly) about paying attention to lots of little pieces of information and trying to push them between people quickly and managing human expectations and keeping everybody oriented around the important next step and a bunch of other things which didn't require years of study but still needed work. Development, by contrast, required a stacked set of skills in dealing with a cooperating set of abstractions and lots of time in singularly focused attention. Doing both at the same time is not something I'd recommend to most people, btw -- dev work is focus-driven, management work is interrupt driven and there's an inherent conflict. So... division of labor makes a lot of sense and you might need someone to do the things involved here to keep the enterprise going as much as you need developers. This stuff "actually matters" even when it isn't rocket science.

It also does happen that there are people who are outlier-good at "soft" tasks. Not as often as people claim, but it does happen.

> trying to hack other people to believe that their skills are what actually matters instead of hard skills ... it actually often works, which is sad.

If they're successful, isn't that more or less proof of the utility of those skills? Being able to persuade people to adopt a given point of view -- or least to be able to negotiate to an agreement -- strikes me as one of the most useful skills there could be. It's essentially hot-swapping code in someone else's brain! :)

I think what most of us technical folks get frustrated at is watching perceived value (and with it, authority and compensation) accumulate outside of our reach. But if this is a perception problem, perhaps the soft skill of persuasion is the answer.

[tbrownaw]

Don't tell me you didn't notice people that lack skills needed for their jobs diverting their attention to their strong aspects

...you mean like pretending that only the easy stuff (interacting with the machine) matters, and all the complicated hard-to-understand things about interacting usefully with other humans are completely irrelevant? :)

instead of hard skills coming from years of practice and suffering

Um, no, the "hard" skills come from playing with the machine and solving puzzles for fun. They're not "hard" as in "not easy", it's as in "not fuzzy".

Due to "nerds being clueless", it actually often works, which is sad.

I do not appreciate your insults to my status as a competent adult.

Are you sure you're as much on the side of the "nerds" as you pretend to be?