[alexanderdmitri]

I think the way to look at it is soft skills can compliment the hard skills, but any engineer w/out the hard skills has nothing to compliment:

engineer w/ hard skills = solid;

engineer w/ hard + soft skills = powerful;

engineer w/only soft skills = useless;

[zunger]

I disagree.

An engineer with soft skills, but no hard skills, isn't an engineer – but their soft skills may be usable elsewhere. (I find that engineering managers need to have a decent amount of engineering skill to be at all effective)

An engineer with hard skills, but no soft skills, is somewhere between unproductive and an active menace. The bare minimum soft skill is the ability to work effectively with others in a team. Someone who lacks this skill contributes more negative value, by harming the operation of the rest of the team, than any one person is able to create, no matter how good they are. And a system built by one person in angry isolation (which is where people quickly end up if they lack those skills) is a disaster from other perspectives: for example, production maintenance and operations, where ultimately only one person understands what they've built.

An engineer with enough hard skills to function in a team, but only that, is a net positive, but I'd hesitate to describe them as "solid" – rather, I'd say that gets them to be an effective journeyman, but means they'll never be able to lead anything, even something small.

Conversely, the "engineer" with lots of soft skills but minimal hard skills can be a manager – but not of anything too complex. Again, their career is permanently limited.

So there's a real law of the minimum at play here. But notably, the place you drop to at zero soft skills is way worse than the place you drop to at zero hard skills. The latter, you can find a use for; the former, you need to get out of your organization as quickly as possible, because they do active damage every day.

[kenhwang]

engineer w/only soft skills = management. Managers have their value too, but you can't only have managers.

[ericd]

I'd infinitely prefer a manager with at least some hard skills than one with none. My most frustrating managers were the ones you describe, because they just weren't at all qualified to make decisions about what we were doing. I don't think I'm alone among engineers in that opinion.

[kenhwang]

Preferring a manager with hard skills is like preferring an engineer with soft skills. It makes everything so much smoother. Similarly, I'd argue that a manager with only soft skills is as frustrating to work with as an engineer with only hard skills. They're functional, but it's not anywhere near ideal.

[OceansOnPluto]

Completely agree, and I'd posit that if you have you never faced a manager with ONLY hard skills and no soft skills, you're lucky. They're miserable to work for. I worked for one who was promoted because he was really, really good at ServiceNow (the service du jour of our company), and he literally thought management was threatening people until he got his way....

...until he was forced out when none of the departments succeeded, that is.