| 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. |