[edmondlau]

It's less about management and technical ability, and more about soft skills and hard skills.

A recent Washington Post article shared an analytical study from Google on what made engineers at the company successful:

"Project Oxygen shocked everyone by concluding that, among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM expertise comes in dead last. The seven top characteristics of success at Google are all soft skills: being a good coach; communicating and listening well; possessing insights into others (including others different values and points of view); having empathy toward and being supportive of one’s colleagues; being a good critical thinker and problem solver; and being able to make connections across complex ideas."

Unfortunately, almost all computer science education nowadays focuses on pure technical skills and hiring interviews at most tech companies also focus on the technical skills. The impact is that many engineers plateau in their careers because they've underinvested in (and oftentimes looked down upon) the "soft skills" that actually separate the top engineers from everyone else.

Here's the article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/12/...

[DoreenMichele]

among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM expertise comes in dead last.

I have a lot of those soft skills. But no one is going to hire me as an engineer because I don't have the coding skills.

It comes in dead last because you have to have high level coding skills to get your foot in the door. Everyone has that. Getting ahead in that crowd means having others assets on top of being a good coder.

It is a little like saying "Height doesn't matter for success as a basketball player. As long as you are at least 6'6", what matters are these other attributes." Yeah, sure, cool. It isn't a strong differentiator for the in crowd because you can't even join the crowd without it.

[avprpl]

I agree. If everyone at some company meets some bar for expertise, then differentiation among peers comes elsewhere.

[robotsonic]

>Project Oxygen shocked everyone by concluding that, among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM expertise comes in dead last.

This result seems a bit unsurprising. People who work at Google would already be in the top n-th percent in terms of STEM expertise. If everyone you hire is 'above average' then being a bit better than that has marginal gains and other factors would lead to your success. I'd be curious to see how this plays out at smaller firms where they cannot afford to hire the top-end STEM expertise.

[edmondlau]

Your observation is a great one, and I'd love to see more data on this as well.

A related point, though, also rings true. Soft skills like being a good coach and effective listening are so underinvested in, that even marginal improvements in those skills lead to huge differences in success.

I see this in engineering leadership workshops that I've run with Jean Hsu and Diana Berlin, where even teaching a handful of coaching and listening skills can have a transformative impact on participants.

If you're interested in future workshops, you can sign up to hear about them here: https://effectiveengineer.typeform.com/to/cDMeZu

[brucephillips]

Do you have any ideas on how companies can better assess soft skills during interviews?

[edmondlau]

At Quip, we run one coding interview that happens on a laptop, and where your conversation and discussions with the interviewer, including how you handle suggestions and feedback, matter a huge deal.

For experienced hires, we'll do deep dives on technical projects that they've worked on. Sometimes, I'll frame these as "Suppose I'm a new member joining that team. Bring me up to speed." These interviews focus on whether the candidate can clearly articulate concepts, explain the big-picture motivations, defend decisions they've made, understand complex technical problems, and stay humble and share lessons learned.

For manager interviews, we'll also do interviews that are one-on-ones with engineers on actual issues that they're facing.

[curun1r]

> we'll also do interviews that are one-on-ones with engineers on actual issues that they're facing.

Be careful with this approach. If you're not paying candidates for their interview time, you're not allowed to use their work. Big companies go to great lengths to demonstrate that the entire interview is for the purpose of a hiring decision and nothing more. This is to limit liability. Your approach is very dangerous for your company and if an unhired candidate's idea shows up in your product, even if you arrived at that result independent of the interview, the candidate has a strong case against you in a lawsuit.

If you're doing interviews like this, be sure you've discussed all the nuances with your company's lawyers.

[michaelt]

Do you just want something that assesses soft skills?

Or do you also want something where all your interviewers will give the same candidate the same score, and that's robust against being gamed?

The former is easy: "Tell me about a time you helped a colleague improve their performance", "What do you think makes for a good coach?" etc etc.

The latter? I've never seen a convincing way of doing it.

[fernandopj]

I strongly agree with this analysis. It's already a population with strong STEM abilities, it should suffer from some sort of diminishing returns after an already high hiring standard on a company well-known for hiring only top students.

It's like conducting an analysis on skills of all F-1 drivers, and what differentiates champions from remaining pilots. I'd expect a lot of mindset-related and soft skills to appear as key indicators, and "driving abilities" to have a minimal gap between drivers.

[josephcooney]

This would be like a study that found that height was completely uncorrelated with performance in the NBA. Doesn't mean that height is irrelevant in basketball, only that selection bias is in full effect and that we're not looking at a 'normal' population with respect to height. Same IMO with respect to google and engineering skill.

[mastratton3]

This makes so much sense and frequently overlooked. I find even in other areas (such as sports), what makes someone seem really impressive generally isn't what is actually important.

A dumb example is from cycling, people frequently over-practice the ability to sprint at the end of a race but what is really important is the ability to conserve energy throughout the race... Really dumb example, but I think it is somewhat similar.

[brucephillips]

Another likely bias is that success is probably measured by peer review, and peers are more likely to overvalue soft skills.

[rifung]

Is there any evidence this is happening? I work at Google and as a lower level engineer more often than not wish some of the leads had better soft skills which makes me think they're not emphasized nearly enough in terms of promotion, which is at least one measure of success.

I believe promotion committees try to see measurable impact, which at least to me sounds like soft skills unfortunately don't help much..

[zamber]

Hopefully this will not morph into another recruiting mantra like it went with bullshit interview questions.

[grandmczeb]

I can’t speak to this particular study, but as a former Google employee, I would take any of the social “research” done at Google with a massive grain of salt. Very little is peer reviewed (or even externally available) and the stuff I looked at internally is not even remotely rigorous.

Additionally, the results that make it to the media get way exaggerated compared to the actual underlying study. This is compounded by the fact that Google picks and chooses what it publicizes, so what you’re seeing has a huge PR/political filter.

[kbenson]

> Unfortunately, almost all computer science education nowadays focuses on pure technical skills

Assuming by computer science education you mean the actual classes within that major, I don't see this as a problem. I didn't take CS classes to learn interpersonal relationship skills. Other college classes and the college experience in general does help with that though.

If talking about tech programs, I also think that isn't necessarily something they can or should focus too much on, as that's not their focus. The assumption is you have that part already figured out. If not, go through a course that focuses on that in addition, I'm sure you'll get a better education in that topic that way. It probably is appropriate for them to stress it's important though, even if they don't offer much in the way of rectifying it.

Or, spend a lot of time on self-directed self improvement in one or both those areas. The resources and programs exist for that as well.

> and hiring interviews at most tech companies also focus on the technical skills.

I agree on this. Companies should hire people that will function within their system. Hiring the smartest guy from MIT's class of 2017 sounds all well and good, but if they can't function well with your existing 100 employees and they leave after a year or two (or worse, they cause a few other people at your company to leave every year causing high turnover), the chances of them somehow making up for that are probably extremely low.

[sbov]

Our CS program had a "basic communication" class, where you learned to write basic reports, memos, emails, your resume, etc. The final project was investigating some piece of tech, writing a 30 page paper on it, and presenting your findings to the class. Other CS teachers were invited to drop in during the presentations too.

Supposedly they added this after receiving feedback from industry that the biggest problem was that their graduating students couldn't properly communicate.

Altogether it felt pretty appropriate, since it was still focused on CS related concepts.

[IronKettle]

> Unfortunately, almost all computer science education nowadays focuses on pure technical skills

I'm not sure I'd really call that unfortunate. CS education isn't about making you a more well-rounded person: It's about giving you a basic education in Computer Science.

Similarly I don't really lament that CS programs don't have a course in basic financial literacy, even though it would be incredibly useful.

These are really topics that should be addressed much, much earlier (empathy in particular is something we should start teaching children as young as possible) and should be mature ideas by the time people reach college-age.

> The impact is that many engineers plateau in their careers because they've underinvested in (and oftentimes looked down upon) the "soft skills" that actually separate the top engineers from everyone else.

To mirror the other comment, I hate to say it but if you're a software engineer at Google you're likely already a "top" engineer.

You're trying to explain what differentiates the top 0.1% from the top 1%, but I'm not sure it's a super useful distinction for the other 99%. For them, investment in hard skills might actually be considerably more fruitful (and land them that Google job in the first place).

Maybe not, I'll admit I could easily be wrong on that.

[edmondlau]

There's for sure a tricky balance on what fits into a CS education.

I remember when I was at MIT (oof, over a decade ago), many project-based CS courses where students were just put into teams and expected teamwork to just happen. Sometimes people got along, and the project would go fine. Other times, not so much.

I know I certainly wasn't very well-equipped to handle tension or to have hard conversations about fair distribution of work. And back them, I ended up just avoiding them. Knowing what I know now, even a single lecture on tools for more effective teams or for having hard conversations or giving feedback would have made those projects SO much more valuable in terms of being learning experiences.

Given that effectively using your CS education will involve collaborating with other people to some degree, I do believe that giving more emphasis to the non-technical skills that play a big role in your career would have a hugely positive impact.

[IronKettle]

> I know I certainly wasn't very well-equipped to handle tension or to have hard conversations about fair distribution of work.

I guess my point is more that primary school really should've prepared you for this: Group dynamics and how to handle these "group tensions" is more of a basic learning skill that we should be developing very early on.

I'm not arguing that this is a useless skill to teach, more that it's far more expensive and much less effective for MIT to be teaching you these skills and not MyTown elementary/middle/high school.

[shrimp_emoji]

Why can't the managers with business backgrounds be the social engineers expertly manipulating the asocial software engineers? I thought that's what they were for. Distribution of labor!

[IronKettle]

I think for me it's more like:

One of the fundamental duties of a middle manager is to worry about group dynamics, team effectiveness, group communication, etc.

If the engineers are now doing all of that as well, what's middle management doing?

("Nothing, same as always" is of course the snarky answer)

[Silhouette]

There are quite a few implicit assumptions here that make it a dubious example, though.

For example, there's an assumption that what works well at Google would work well for other tech firms. And yet Google is in the rare position of having gained so much from its early golden goose that success in terms of producing viable, valuable products and services has been almost irrelevant among most of its workforce for most of its existence.

There's also an assumption that the staff at a big, famous organisation like Google are generally better than those elsewhere, and therefore that being successful in such an organisation is something to be emulated. Working at one of the Big Five seems like a default aspiration for some parts of the tech world, and there's definitely an element of hero worship for those who have made it. I can't help wondering whether that is simply because of the amount of money they can throw at new starters in the hope that they attract some of the best people among the catch.

What I see here is that if you're in an environment where being good at walking the walk isn't always necessary, talking a good talk becomes the path to recognition and success. While this is almost certainly true, anyone who's ever observed the phenomenon of middle management could have told you that, without reference to any specific industry. What it doesn't tell us is how much being able to walk the walk matters in most other environments where it is necessary for success.

[marcosdumay]

The prase "success of people working at X is correlated with Y" has about the same meaning of "X recruitment process is weakest on select Y".

[quadcore]

The seven top characteristics of success at Google are all soft skills: being a good coach; communicating and listening well; possessing insights into others (including others different values and points of view); having empathy toward and being supportive of one’s colleagues; being a good critical thinker and problem solver; and being able to make connections across complex ideas."

That is describing what it takes for an individual to be successful in a group of men. I think Im safe in saying this is like that since the dawn of men. Specifically here, it happens in organisations big enough so that people's actual productivity is unknown.

Innovation though generally doesn't happen in such environment.

[rifung]

By group of men are you using that like group of people or are you saying it's specific to males?

[quadcore]

I meant human

[brucephillips]

What about this is specific to men?

[quadcore]

I meant human.

[ssivark]

> Project Oxygen shocked everyone by concluding that, among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM expertise comes in dead last.

And yet it seems to me that the typical software/technical interview process emphasizes #8 more than the other seven. Maybe like the drunkard searching for lost keys under the lamp post. Quite sobering.

[whack]

"Project Oxygen shocked everyone by concluding that, among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM expertise comes in dead last. The seven top characteristics of success at Google are all soft skills"

Worth keeping in mind that this is true for the culture/environment within Google, not universally. Different companies have different cultures, and the above actually makes me more cynical about the culture within Google. If two people have competing ideas for a engineering solution/implementation, is the winner going to be the one with the best technical merits, or the one best at office politics? Judging from the above study, it seems like Google's culture is less meritocracy-driven and more politics-driven than people think.

[barrkel]

This is the article that argues that for people in the top 1% of STEM expertise, STEM expertise isn't the distinguishing factor.

Frankly, it would be surprising if it was. If you've topped out that tech tree, most of your performance variance will come from other areas where there's more, uh, variance.

[josephcooney]

I did some reading into project Oxygen. From what I could tell it set out to find the most important qualities for managers at google, which made the results much less surprising. I would love to find more info on this either way.