[Carpetsmoker]

Some of the worst and most ineffective coworkers I've ever worked with were intelligent, knowledgable, skilled, and severally lacking in the social skills department. In some cases I've seen the more abrasive and toxic variants of these people completely crush morale for the rest of the team or company, and destroy any success. They were a net loss to the company.

Yeah, social skills matter. A lot. It's not about having a girlfriend, it's about effective communication with the people you work with.

[collyw]

I am coming to the conclusion that social skills are probably more valuable than coding skills. I don't think I am especially productive in my current job due to a lot of context switching, but I think they like me for my attitude.

[Carpetsmoker]

Clearly you need both; I've also worked with really sociable and nice people who were a great laugh but couldn't program their way out of a paper bag if the survival of the human species depended on it.

[DylanDmitri]

Social/engineering skill are two sides of a rectangle, and the area is what matters.

[ShteiLoups]

"Engineering is a team sport" - me

You need to be able to work with others to produce things, unless you always work alone. Social skills are a very important part of that.

[username90]

The ability to partition work into independent chunks is way more important than social skills when you work as a software engineer with other software engineers. Then they can work on their things and you can work on yours with little need for further communication.

And don't come saying that divvying up technical tasks is a social skill, it really isn't.

[saagarjha]

At some point your work needs to interact with other people's.

[username90]

If you don't understand what technical information they need to do their job then you lack technical skills. If you don't understand what technical information you need to request from others then you lack technical skills. If you can't write them down or express them in words you lack technical skills. If you can do those things then you can work with others and be productive.

You might not be fit for a career in sales but that is not what we are discussing. The only major "social skill" you need is the ability to not offend or inconvenience others. This part is not very hard and doesn't need repeating as much as people do it.

[tekkk]

If by valuable you mean they keep you employed despite not doing anything, sure. They are valuable for career progress and such, but when faced with real technical difficulties, you are not going to talk yourself out of it. Or maybe you can, delegate them to some poor bastard. What a wonderful world we are living in.

[collyw]

I didn't say that I did nothing, I just know that I have been more productive in previous jobs due to a number of factors. But hey perhaps you lack some social skills jumping to conclusions like that.

[christiansakai]

On the other hand, my colleagues talk a lot. Like, almost half of their day (i.e, 4 hours) is spend talking about random topics like weather, food, gossipping etc and nothing job related. They aren't that skillful coding wise. But I wonder, is this more acceptable than having hard coding skills? Serious question.

[ravenstine]

In my experience, people are more interested in being around cool people than competence. (I'm not making a value judgment here)

[etagobla]

I agree, but there's a certain line that a good software engineer should not cross and that's where their improved social skills make local gf attainment feasible, because then they'll start devoting their time to other things.

In my case I can already see my increased HN karma pulling me away from our tablegen spec. With a gf I'd be useless.

[taylorlapeyre]

Are you implying that being able to have an intimate relationship with another human being disqualifies someone from being a "good software engineer"?

[etagobla]

It's not an absolute one to one relationship. I'm talking about general trends.

[rafa1981]

Some people downvoting you may be lacking skills to detect that this, even if partly true, is a joke. For me it was good.

[etagobla]

haha they don't like me today