[marginalia_nu]

The sort of people who have been able to neglect their soft skills are probably still going to be able to do so in the future. But those were always the extreme intelligence outliers, generational talent type figures.

For most software engineers, neglect of soft skills have always been a career tarpit that leads nowhere you want to end up. Being able to navigate social settings and to communicate well is a force multiplier. For most people, it really doesn't matter how good you are if nobody understands what you are saying and you can't convince other people to buy into your ideas. You far more often see moderately successful charlatans that are all talk than successful people with awful communication skills. Of course if you're able to walk the talk, that's when you can really go places.

[robocat]

> [people without soft skills] were always the extreme intelligence outliers

This is a B-player myth.

High intelligence makes you better at soft skills. People are complex, and being good at soft skills takes intelligence, intelligence to intuit the importance and see the patterns of soft skills.

It is true that if you have high skills that a business needs, you can choose to ignore many internal norms of dress or etiquette.

And also as your status goes up, the more you don't need to care about signaling, and some people do counter-signalling. I always think of this: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/lifestyle/article-9233455/Prince...

Unfortunately it is also true that some people think that acting badly will give them cred (reversing the causality that having cred permits bad behaviour). Was Sam-Bankman-Fried acting that cryptic appearance? Do executives also model their behaviour by rewatching The Apprentice or Gordon Ramsay?

Disclaimer: That's mostly my personal opinion, from watching people smarter than I. Then again I'm no genius, nor do I win status games, so perhaps I'm just ignorant. I've definitely seen some less talented try and put on an act leading to a pratfall. Also many of the smartest people I know left school at 15.

[UK-Al05]

Intelligence scales with social skills.

Unless you have a condition like autism which allows skewed development, which a lot software engineers do have.

[robocat]

To add - their comment about socially prickly smart devs (my paraphrase) makes me think they are referencing the mad genius stereotype (crazy artist, Aspie developer, etcetera).

Are rudeness and crazyness markers of intelligence? is Terry Davis a good or bad example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16105215

[retinaros]

you can be better and decide not to do it because you dgaf

[watwut]

> The sort of people who have been able to neglect their soft skills are probably still going to be able to do so in the future. But those were always the extreme intelligence outliers, generational talent type figures.

This is just not true. Lack of soft skill never implied high intelligence, it was always and is just lack of soft skills. Some people without them are otherwise highly intelligent, others are just normal or even weaker then average.

> You far more often see moderately successful charlatans that are all talk than successful people with awful communication skills. Of course if you're able to walk the talk, that's when you can really go places.

I would argue that this is consequence of management that does NOT have soft skills. People write a lot about soft skills of engineers and simply assume management has them. They do not always, yes they then end up being bad managers ... and charlatans doing good is usually consequence of bad management without those actual people skills. Soft skills are not just about coming across nice, they are also about being able to be assertive, being able to recognize charlatans or toxic personalities and being able to deal with them (which is not the same as enabling them).

[marginalia_nu]

Where did I claim one implied the other?

[MattGaiser]

The shift is from tarpit to unemployment. A Jira ticket processing dev still has use. Probably not for much longer.

[marginalia_nu]

Doubt we'll see that in the short term. Long term, possibly, especially if you add a financial crisis.

Truth is most larger software development organizations could have even before LLMs downsized significantly and not lost much productivity.

The X formerly known as Twitter did this and has been chugging along on a fraction on its original staff count. It's had some brand problems since its acquisition, but those are more due to Mr Musk's eccentricities and political ventures than the engineering team.

The reason this hasn't happened to any wider degree is quarterly capitalism and institutional inertia. Looks weird to the investors if the organization claims to be doing well but is also slashing its employee count by 90%. Even if you bring a new CEO in that has these ideas, the org chart will fight it with tooth and nail as managers would lose reportees and clout.

Consultancies in particular are incredibly inefficient by design since they make more money if they take more time and bring a larger headcount to the task: They don't sell productivity, but man hours. Hence horrors like SAFe.

[oblio]

The thing is, Twitter is stuck. It's not growing, most likely it's shrinking. We also have no idea if it's profitable or not.

Twitter had a lot of engineers on its payroll to look for the next big thing.

If you give that up and keep a skeleton crew, sure, that works.

Most businesses don't want to become husks of their former selves.

[marginalia_nu]

At the same time, that quest for the next big thing is performative, it's theater for the investors, and exactly what I'm talking about.

It was objectively bad for facebook's net profits to pour over $10 billion into the metaverse, what they gambled would be the next big thing, but the perception that they were cooking up something new, even if that was a massive waste of money, was better for their valuation than the sense that they were just resting on their laurels.

[9JollyOtter]

> Twitter had a lot of engineers on its payroll to look for the next big thing.

What was the "next big thing" before acquisition? There seems to be more features added after the acquisition than before it.

[xhevahir]

I think the author would say that the developer who is without soft skills won't merely be prevented from gaining desirable work. They'll be unable to keep a job, period.

[marginalia_nu]

Seems a pretty sketchy assertion, but regardless whether these people burn out in career purgatory at a java 8 feature factory moving jira tickets around for all of eternity, or they move on to something else entirely, it's probably not what they had in mind.