[Jensson]

When people say you need soft skills to succeed they mean you need to have empathy for your manager and make your manager happy, nobody cares about the user. You see software riddled with bugs everywhere etc that would get fixed easily if anyone related to that project actually cared, but hey if the manager doesn't notice the problem then the problem doesn't exist so better not bring it up!

What you'll find is that many of those said to have bad soft skills actually just cared way more about the users than their coworkers. Steve Jobs or Linus Torvalds for example, if you sacrifice the user experience then this kind of people will get angry at you. If you are the top of the company it works, but if you want to climb the corporate hierarchy it doesn't matter you just need empathy for your boss, so you will get nothing for getting upset when your manager and your peers sacrifice user experience for no reason.

[dasil003]

I hear you, but you're conflating two things and drawing an overly reductive conclusion:

> if you want to climb the corporate hierarchy it doesn't matter you just need empathy for your boss, so you will get nothing for getting upset when your manager and your peers sacrifice user experience for no reason.

The second half of this sentence is true for any concern not just UX: if you get emotional about your manager and peers doing [anything they consistently do as a group] under the assumption they are doing it for no reason then you have already failed to understand the culture and marginalized yourself and your growth opportunities in that environment.

The first half is a false conclusion born out of the bitterness of passion tempered by misunderstanding. It may be true that in some nepotistic hierarchies that empathy for your boss would be sufficient, but as an engineer who has made a successful career by caring deeply about UX I can assure you it's no way to live. In healthy corporate cultures promotion to higher levels depends more on broad cross-functional empathy and the ability to collaborate and have good judgement with limited depth of information.

[Jensson]

Right, if your manager cares deeply about UX you should too. That doesn't refute anything I said, it is still the manager that is important.

[dasil003]

My goal was not to refute you, it was to offer a broader perspective based on decades of experience caring about the same things you seem to care about.

The words I used were "overly reductive". Yes, what your manager thinks is important, but so is the broader company culture and what you believe to be right. If the entire company doesn't value something and you do then you're fighting a losing battle and you should get out before your internal motivation is replaced by cynical survivalism. On the other hand, if the company does but your boss doesn't, then the trick is to keep your boss happy and work on the stuff that matters to you with the people that do care.

Keep in mind that managers come and go, if you subvert your own values and judgement simply to align with your manager, you may get a better performance review in the short-term, but in the long term you lose yourself and won't gain the kinds of leadership skills that are key to long-term success.

[_y5hn]

Often there are many times more concerns than just UX. Some of them real, other concerns manufactured. However, when the decision process is kept opaque, respect is kind of lost in that kind of environment. From experience, the people will never change either, but things can change when their start to die, retire or relocate.

It doesn't help to change company, when the same fads sooner or later starts getting pushed down there as well.

[bitwize]

Lack of empathy is commonly cited by Hackernews as the reason why some Linux app doesn't work exactly the way its macOS equivalent does.

[asiachick]

plug in a keyboard with an END key, oh ... like this one

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MK2C3LL/A/magic-keyboard-...

and then tell me again that apple cars about the user or that HN wishes it was like MacOS :p