[quotemstr]

The recent trend toward replacing technical acumen with "soft skills" is disturbing.

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.

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?)

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 huge 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.

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.

[rosser]

Please cite examples of calls for "replacing" hard skills with soft. That's far more a straw man than the one you "dispense with" — conveniently distracting from your own, I might add. I'm hearing a call for recognizing their value as complementary and essential in their own, independent ways. Soft skills do not supplant hard skills, but either is worth less without the other.

If you're arguing against that, then you're part of the problem.

It's also what we call a "false dilemma" to suggest that your proffered interpretations for this "trend" are the only interpretations for it.

[lhnz]

It's not necessarily that people are calling for hard skills to be replaced with soft skills, however they are writing articles in which they imply that soft skills are more valuable than hard skills at Google [1].

It's basic self-interest. If you believe that you're unable to sell your hard skills to an employer, it's in your interest to try to convince people that what you offer (superior generosity, motivational speaking, equality and empathy) will be more likely to bring success to an employer.

People don't need to literally call for hard skills to be replaced because that's not the end-goal. The goal here is that employer's realise that soft skills are more important so that the status of these careers is higher than that of software engineers.

  [1] https://twitter.com/joelgrus/status/945114254922825730

[rosser]

That "soft skills are more valuable than hard" is not what I read in that article. It sounds more to me like degrees in STEM correlate less well with success at Google than people expected. Not "negatively" — "less positively", and merely less positively than people anticipated. So what was the "wrong" here? People's assumptions. This is my surprised face.

But I'm probably biased to read it more generously than someone else might be; I was a philosophy major in undergrad, and actively repudiate the ludicrous notion that a broader, more liberal education is somehow wasteful. So YMMV.

EDIT: Look at it this way: you can be the most brilliant technologist in the history of ever. If you're impossible to work with, you're a liability, not an asset. You drive away anyone who tries to work with you, and/or your bus factor is, give or take, ∞.

Once again, "if you're arguing against that, then you're part of the problem."

[lhnz]

This 'brilliant technologist that is impossible to work with' mythos needs to die. The majority of us are normal people and don't deserve to be stereotyped in this way.

A broader, more liberal education isn't a waste, but I don't think that such a thing would lead anybody to call out nerds for social deficiencies while singing one's own praises. If it does, then yes, that is a shocking waste of an education.

Not being able to see this and trying to throw people under the bus with unfair stereotypes in order to get ahead is just as bad as having strong hard skills but being devoid of empathy. (It is practically a mirror image: having strong soft skills but being devoid of empathy.)

[rosser]

You're misconstruing my position. Yes, the rockstar asshole is rare, but I've worked with enough of them to know how destructive they are to the morale of the team. I was also once tasked with rewriting years of a rockstar asshole's code in months because said rockstar asshole left in a huff over not being treated the way he wanted, and no-one else had ever touched his deliberately impenetrable code. (All function and variable names were one or two letters, &c. But up until that point, he was just so productive, the employer put up with his behavior, and ignored the turnover on the rest of the team — which, miraculously, changed dramatically after he left. Go figure.)

So I'll freely own that I may have a small chip there. But at the same time, while the plural of anecdote isn't data, an existence proof is an existence proof.

[lhnz]

I don't think we disagree but I do think you're absolving the sins of social assholes because of the sins of asocial assholes.

I've met rockstar asshole programmer's before, but I think it is overblown -- I do not think there are as many as everybody thinks there are. Far more often I've met great engineers that were well-rounded, kind and decent people. And yet the myth persists...

[PoachedSausage]

The problem we have is that fewer and fewer people are choosing to pursue hard engineering skills, partly because they're, well, hard and partly because soft skills seem to provide an equal or better living. I have nothing against philosophers, musicians and poets, I spent most of today being entertained by them on the radio, but without the hard skills the comforts of civilisation like running water, electricity and internet will disappear.

[rosser]

It's, again, anecdotal, and no small amount of confirmation bias, but I've been a technologist for over 20 years now. In all that time, most of my favorite technical colleagues, including their "hard" skills, were film majors, sociologists, historians, &c.

You do not need a STEM degree to be an outstanding technologist, or even a competent one. Far and away, the most valuable skill for this kind of work is critical thinking, and I've never seen classes teaching that offered outside the "liberal arts".

[quotemstr]

The bridge designer imagining failure modes for a new bridge design isn't critical thinking, but the liberal arts autoethnography about the colonial etiology of Daft Punk, that's critical thinking?

Reality is the opposite of your assertion: critical thinking is largely dead outside STEM, and that's because only in STEM does reality punish you for indulging sweet-sounding nonsense.

I've also met good developers over the course of over 20 years writing software. Many of them had no degree or an irrelevant degree. I respect them tremendously, but they're exceptions.

The kind of thinking that today's liberal arts departments encourage is contrary to the rigor needed to solve real engineering problems, and it's rare that you find in a single individual both a knack for the cold logic of engineering and the social sensitivity needed to succeed in a world of post-modern, post-logic quicksand.

[PoachedSausage]

From what I have seen critical thinking, as a natural aptitude is quite rare. You can probably encourage it, but I doubt it can really be taught, even if those in authority wanted it.

[oceanghost]

You've locked onto the exact reason here. The incentives are all wrong.

Learn how to work people like a psychopath manager? Unlimited earning potential. Learn hard skills? Pigeonholed as "too valuable" to promote while being taken advantage of by those psychopaths until you connect enough dots to expose them or are deemed no longer necessary to their evil plan.

[quotemstr]

> if you're arguing against that, then you're part of the problem

That's in incredibly dangerous and irresponsible thing to write. We need to entertain all arguments, not enshrine some things in untouchable dogma. Calling people personally awful for stating an argument --- instead of addressing the argument --- is the reason that today's public discourse is bonkers.

The line I quoted above turns disagreement into a witch hunt.

[Viliam1234]

>> if you're arguing against that, then you're part of the problem

> That's in incredibly dangerous and irresponsible thing to write.

Also quite ironic, in context of an article advising to "make sure that everyone’s voice is heard, and that important warnings don’t get lost because someone didn’t feel safe saying so". Because this is how the warnings get silenced.

[rosser]

When "the problem" is over-valuing hard skills, and under-valuing soft skills, which is TFA's thesis (and mine, for purposes of this discussion), then it's rather less a "witch hunt" — which is speciously hyperbolic language in the first place, and the use of which, I submit, is far more contributory to the state of "discourse", such as it is.

I also, you'd do well to note, never called anyone "personally awful" (more specious hyperbole, hmm?). I said, paraphrased, that certain behaviors and positions are contributory to ("part of") "the problem", which we've already established is pretty narrowly defined.

[quotemstr]

No. You don't get to do that. You don't get to call people "the problem" just for making an argument. You don't get to just declare yourself the victor by impugning the character of your opponent. If this style of argumentation is what "soft skills" in tech means, we're heading to a dark place.

[chandanrai]

Technology and technologists are to solve the problems, they're not the problem or a part of it.

I have spent more than a decade working with brilliant technologists but haven't found anyone impossible to work with. As in technology, I have found some compatibility issues among/with technologists, but that can be worked out.

Also I have seen some technologists are unable to put forth a strong defense verbal or written when accused wrongly and thus becoming aunt Sally, people find them easier to put blame on.

[DrScump]

  they imply that soft skills are more valuable than hard skills at Google

More valuable, or just more difficult to find there?

[xkcd-sucks]

I've seen 'soft' vs 'hard' skills treated as a constant-sum quantity, e.g. somebody who conclusively demonstrates hard skills must not have soft skills so they must be a bad person to work with, won't be able to teach/learn, probably works badly in a team, etc. This is in the context of hiring meetings to discuss candidates. Interestingly, the opposite isn't as strong: a candidate with soft skills is presumed capable of picking up hard skills quickly, although it doesn't actually happened in most of these hires

[tbrownaw]

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.

Yes, hard technical skills are absolutely necessary for "building the thing right". The necessary level of skill depends on what that thing is.

But there's also "building the right thing", and that is a completely different set of skills. Many of which get lumped into the "soft skills" bucket.

[lliamander]

> But there's also "building the right thing", and that is a completely different set of skills. Many of which get lumped into the "soft skills" bucket.

Actually, I think Zunger makes the explicit point that they are not completely different skill sets. I'm inclined to agree with him.

[aalleavitch]

There's a lot of roles on a team, though, and some of them require "soft skills" more than technical skills. For instance, your scrum master is probably better served by having strong people and management skills and a more general understanding of the technical problems the team is facing on a day-to-day basis rather than a deep understanding of implementation details. The idea wouldn't be to focus on staffing a team full of "soft skills" people, but rather to fill your team with people who cover a broad range of different skill sets applicable to different situations. So maybe you've got a hard computer scientist who can pound out complex implementations in a few seconds; she's probably ultimately going to really appreciate having a teammate who's better at condensing the scatterbrain designer's ideas into a hard set of specs that won't require as many back-and-forth feedback iterations even if said teammate isn't as good of a programmer as she is.

[skybrian]

Who is arguing for "soft skills only"? Haven't seen that so far.

[bjourne]

I agree with this. The argument I have heard a million times is that technical people can't understand non-technical people's (whatever "non-technical" mean, partitioning people as either technical/hard or non-technical/soft is dumb) perspectives. Therefore, for a product to succeed, it needs to be designed by non-technical people. But the assumption is wrong and letting non-technical people design products more often than not just leads to badly designed products.

[tbrownaw]

But the assumption is wrong and letting non-technical people design products more often than not just leads to badly designed products.

Yes, just like letting the technical people do the design.

Good design uses a separate set of skills, which few people have because few people realize they're important. There is very little correlation between having this set of skills and having the usual set of "hard" technical skills.

[skybrian]

What's an example of a product that was badly designed because the product designer wasn't technical enough?

[adrianratnapala]

You have to see it from the inside to be sure that this (rather than some other pathology) is going on, so I will give an example from my own work.

I wrote a design program for [thingys] that were basically rectangles, but could have circular arcs instead of straight line edges. A user could fake a circle using two semicircles joined by zero length edges.

The PM saw this and wanted a circular [thingy] feature. He could not understand that it was only a fake circle, such that when the user started changing things, (literal!) corner cases would crop up. Over time, he kept demanding new features that implicitly relied on non-fake circles. And of course this just kept throwing up more confusing corner cases that he kept trying to paper over with new features.

This is one example of a HUGE class of problems that come down to managers just wishing away a mismatch between the way data and code actually work, and the features that they would like to have.

[u801e]

Your example reminds me of this video [1] that (humorously) goes over a similar mismatch problem.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

[adrianratnapala]

Yes this is a classic, and I think I was first introduced to it when I was going through my fake-circle trauma. As ridiculous as it seems, it describes the real (mis)behaviour of people. But I feel there should be an equal and opposite video. Perhaps one where an engineer keeps producing solutions to problems nobody has. (An astroturf mower? A robot that goes to the gym for you?)

I think if you had both those videos and a convincing explanation of how they can both be truthful, the combination would great training material for everyone on a product team.

[skybrian]

I'm sure there's more to the story but it seems like there's a missing conversation here: "why don't we replace the fake circles with real circles?"

A healthy team would have that conversation. I'm not sure the PM needs to understand so much as defer to the engineering side if they decide a change is needed.

[adrianratnapala]

We'd had that conversation [1]; and (we thought) the answer was that real circles were not worth the extra complexity, especially since common use-cases could be covered by fake circles. Or at least we thought we'd had that conversation, but it turns out moot if the PM can't retain in is mind, the difference between fake and real circles.

I don't think deference to engineers is useful in this sort of thing. There is a class of people (PMs) who have the hard job of aligning user expectations with the engineered reality. They do this by guiding both the customers and engineers, and to do that, they must understand the real landscape they are guiding people through.

[1] I don't want to imply here that everything was the fault of the PM, it wasn't. But there was definately a class bad things that happened due to this particular kind of non-technical thinking.

[nostrademons]

Yahoo? After Semel took over, they were explicitly organized as a media company, with a CEO who had deep experience in the media industry, managers coming from other media companies, and a sidelining of much of the original technical talent.

As a result, they completely missed that the continued growth of the Internet would make hand-curated approaches infeasible. And so they got their lunch eaten by Google. And then they started losing traffic on other properties to Google, who could leverage their massive technological infrastructure that Yahoo had largely copied and open-sourced but wasn't really integrating into their product design. Eventually they brought in an ex-Googler as CEO who tried to stem the tide and re-emphasize Yahoo's technical capabilities, but she was 10 years too late and fighting a whole culture by then.

[bjourne]

In this context, "not technical enough" means "not being able to accurately estimate technical costs." I posit that there is a correlation between being technical and being able to estimate technical costs:

One example I have seen a lot is the "exactly as I want it" design. What that means is foregoing using any standard web components (like Bootstrap, jqueryUI, ...) because they don't work exactly as the product designer wants, so you have to build something from scratch. Then you run out of time because building a complex web site without relying on any ready-made components is a lot of work, leaving the web site in a decidedly half-assed state.

As you can see, in my opinion "being technical" is not only about programming. It is also about YAGNI, being lazy and very much being a realistic pessimist.

[mannykannot]

I don't think we have to choose between reasons for bad design - both causes being discussed here have occurred repeatedly - but since you asked, I would suggest that there have been many products with security failures arising from designers not having sufficient skill in that area.

[john_moscow]

>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.

I would dare say this mechanism has been in trouble for the past decade or so and that's the root of the problem. If you're a large company with a sizable share in an established market, technical quality becomes secondary. It's customers' habits, compatibility and your sales budget that run the show. Until the market turns and you go bust, of course.

If you're quickly growing startup, the budget you can spend on growth (i.e. the amount you can raise) far outweighs the technical side. Efficiency? Investors don't care about that, they care about you making enough buzz and getting acquired (or IPOing) while you're still hot. They will get a return even if you never had a single profitable quarter.

Unfortunately, as much as we technical people hate this, I don't see any reason for the "IQ -> EQ" trend to be reversed anytime soon. Not in the current market. The only way out of this circus is making your own bootstrapped business.

[cryptica]

Some of the best developers I know have bad soft skills and they have had trouble holding onto a steady job because of it. Being fired often makes them more bitter, less trusting and further damages their soft skills which turns into a vicious cycle.

Part of the problem is the increased intolerance to conflict in the workplace. Employees these days get fired for merely having self-respect and conviction.

[lliamander]

I may agree with your general sentiment, but I think the OP actually avoids the specific mistake that you are criticizing. Let me highlight a few key quotes:

> There always remain various hard [technical problems], of course, which are critical and which can’t be solved by any number of inexperienced people except by them getting experience; that’s why we need to continue to build and grow our technical skills. But if you continue to grow your skillset, you’ll quickly discover that the amount of time that needs to be spent on these extremely difficult technical problems tends towards significantly less than a full-time job; instead, the crucial (and incredibly hard) problems that affect a system have more to do with how that system interacts with the outside world — which is, more and more, people.

> Interestingly, there’s a lot more crossover between hard and soft skills than many people realize: when you start to see your system as a component of a larger system which includes humans as elements, and you start to ask how humans interact with each other and what their behaviors are, then many of the same “hard skills” systems design approaches not only make sense, but can provide even better answers to traditionally purely “soft” questions.

Eric Raymond said something similar recently[0]:

> Whole-systems engineering, when you get good at it, goes beyond being entirely or even mostly about technical optimizations. Every artifact we make is situated in a context of human action that widens out to the economics of its use, the sociology of its users, and the entirety of what Austrian economists call “praxeology”, the science of purposeful human behavior in its widest scope.

Also see Pieter Hintjens' book _Social Architecture_[1].

This is a sensitive issue, because it comes down to the question of who is at the top of the hierarchy, and it's part of human nature to be highly sensitive to our relative position within a given hierarchy. For those of us who have technical skills and an analytical temperament, we naturally want to be in an environment where those qualities are most advantageous in moving up the hierarchy.

I think Zunger's point is that, even within such an organization, there certain skills (which are not specifically technical) which are necessary to being maximally effective at the top of the hierarchy.

[0] http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7745

[1] https://www.gitbook.com/book/hintjens/social-architecture/de...

[newman8r]

I also feel like this particular article fails to address the intrapersonal aspects of 'soft skills' and mostly considers the interpersonal issues.