Hard and Soft Skills in Tech

https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/hard-and-soft-skills-in-tech-8be00216f67f?source=linkShare-ccff18f5a169-1514394601

by pdevine • 9 years ago

121 110 9 years ago

tome5• 9 years ago

I appreciate the content of the article but I can't help picking up a dose of disrespect from the author towards exactly the collection of people he is trying to persuade.

ionforce• 9 years ago

Who do you think the author is trying to persuade and where did you detect disrespect?

tome5• 9 years ago

I suspect the author is trying to persuade those who make 'very anxious responses from people in tech at anything which suggests that their “core skills” may be devalued' and the reason I feel the tone is disrespectful is because he shows very little empathy for them. On the other hand, perhaps instead the point of the article is to reassure those with the soft skills that they will soon be more valuable than they currently are.

0xcde4c3db2• 9 years ago

While I broadly agree with the author's characterization and summary of the importance of "real" soft skills, that seems to be a tiny slice of how the term is used. I've seen discussions of soft skills cover a ridiculously broad assortment of actual skills, cultural sensitivities, in-group identity behaviors, personality traits, and neurological aptitudes. Without being a lot clearer about the scope, I think there's a real risk of a "soft skills are real and important" position mutating into "if I don't like somebody it's just because they didn't work hard enough, not because there's anything strange about my expectations".

jschwartzi2• 9 years ago

Mostly soft skills represent your ability to react rationally and appropriately to your own emotions and to the emotions of others--even emotions that you're anticipating and not just experiencing. The most basic soft skill in my mind is empathy, which is your ability to anticipate how others will feel in a given situation. If you're not capable of empathy I do not want you as my manager.

gt_2• 9 years ago

Be careful with the term ‘empathy’. The contemporary use of this word (reflected in your definition) conflates a few different concepts in a potentially confusing manner. An ability to predict how others feel can be used, to put it simply, for both good and evil. A sociopath has high empathy. Do you want a sociopath as your manager?

A better set of characteristics to look for might be: sympathy, compassion, consideration, honesty.

‘Empathy’ as a term actually has a shaky and very recent etymology which reflects some of the contradictions it plays into. A loose translation of it’s origins is to express sympathy, which has a slight technical from what it means now, because it has been widely adopted as dignified form of sympathy. The difference from the classical term sympathy is that empathy is more correlated with communication than intention. Why has it gained in popularity? A socio-cultural argument might center on the fact that empathy carries less vulnerability than sympathy. There are some serious implications here.

The general problem with the focus on empathy is the loss of a bigger picture concern with being sincere. It’s analogous to short-term concerns vs. long-term concerns, where short-term concern is to provide immediate comfort and long-term concern is to provide sustainment and survival. A highly social workplace will value immediate social relations like expression of compassion while overlooking important long term values like honesty and less-empathetic forms of sympathy.

Ideally, we would maintain both, but these simplifications of the issue are unlikely to support that outcome.

newman8r2• 9 years ago

I choose intuition over empathy, but clearly they're both important.

alexandercrohde2• 9 years ago

As it stands I think "soft skills" is one of those buzzwords like "critical thinking." Everybody thinks its good, but it hasn't been established as a scientifically-valid / measurable concept.

Thus the phrase "Soft skills" gives a veneer of objectivity to something to personal dynamics that are incredibly subjective and unscientific. The term is potentially a weapon for the politically-savvy to punish those who oppose them with an unfalsifiable attack.

bitL7• 9 years ago

Given many folks use tech to escape real-world interaction with messy, untrustworthy and corrupt people, finding their fantasy world in getting awesome things done, I doubt the hard skills will be replaced by soft ones. This is actually a symptom of sociopathic tendencies taking over tech which is a marker for "dark ages" coming, and neutralizing any progress coming from tech. The sociopaths finally figured out tech and will use it to enforce their agendas to detriment of most of us as we will be forced to spend our time on things we don't believe in and lie to each other we do meaningful things for betterment of humanity, which we won't. All large corps are becoming politically loaded places where one expression of "wrongthink" eclipses any achievements an individual did in the past, nuking future career. As sociopaths can't really compete on hard skills, they push soft-skill, touchy-feely agendas, identified as weak spots of techies that can't handle them reasonably in many cases. Oh, you achieved this awesome stuff that grew company by $100M? Well, you still don't smile at everyone, this fresh grad thinks you don't appreciate their Harvardness, please get better at this or no promotions/bonuses for you!

watwut4• 9 years ago

Tech is full of messy, untrustworthy and corrupt people. There was never lack of sociopaths or bad actors in tech, no less then anywhere else. We are however, fond of telling ourselves that we are better then everyone else.

bitL7• 9 years ago

Sure, but our industry was never as corrupt as e.g. finances, doing back-channel financing of atrocities like wars/genocides, buying politicians to bypass popular sentiment, setting up drug distribution centers and prostitution rings nearby so that their employees can kill their inner humanity and have reward for corrupting themselves. My fear is that we are becoming the same and that change is happening right now.

abusoufiyan2• 9 years ago

Don't most people use tech to argue with each other on the Internet?

specializeded• 9 years ago

We also use it to construct theories about sociopaths infiltrating the industry and realigning the biggest players’ cultures to better suit their sociopath interests when someone suggests people skills might not be irrelevant.

Judgmentality• 9 years ago

You've clearly got an axe to grind. The idea that sociopaths didn't exist in tech before is pretty easy to disprove, unless you think Steve Jobs was a benevolent person. Not to mention Ellison, Kalanick, Khosla, and honestly the list is endless (venture capitalists are famous for being assholes, many would say it's an asset to doing their job).

Money attracts assholes, I don't think many people would argue with that (although I'd honestly be interested in hearing arguments against this). So if your goal is to keep them away, then just make sure to never monetize your product.

moduspol• 9 years ago

I think parent poster is drawing a distinction between sociopathy toward capitalistic ends (i.e. making money, providing something of value to someone) and sociopathy toward ideological ends (e.g. social justice, trying to reform the world to be as one believes it should).

We always knew about the former, and it's in every industry. The latter is the more recent (and relevant) phenomenon.

bhl• 9 years ago

Weirdly enough, I feel like saying the blame should not be put on the people for being assholes; assholery is not something people are born with. Rather, the type of environment is at fault for self-selecting for them.

alexanderdmitri• 9 years ago

I think the way to look at it is soft skills can compliment the hard skills, but any engineer w/out the hard skills has nothing to compliment:

engineer w/ hard skills = solid;

engineer w/ hard + soft skills = powerful;

engineer w/only soft skills = useless;

kenhwang2• 9 years ago

engineer w/only soft skills = management. Managers have their value too, but you can't only have managers.

zunger4• 9 years ago

I disagree.

An engineer with soft skills, but no hard skills, isn't an engineer – but their soft skills may be usable elsewhere. (I find that engineering managers need to have a decent amount of engineering skill to be at all effective)

An engineer with hard skills, but no soft skills, is somewhere between unproductive and an active menace. The bare minimum soft skill is the ability to work effectively with others in a team. Someone who lacks this skill contributes more negative value, by harming the operation of the rest of the team, than any one person is able to create, no matter how good they are. And a system built by one person in angry isolation (which is where people quickly end up if they lack those skills) is a disaster from other perspectives: for example, production maintenance and operations, where ultimately only one person understands what they've built.

An engineer with enough hard skills to function in a team, but only that, is a net positive, but I'd hesitate to describe them as "solid" – rather, I'd say that gets them to be an effective journeyman, but means they'll never be able to lead anything, even something small.

Conversely, the "engineer" with lots of soft skills but minimal hard skills can be a manager – but not of anything too complex. Again, their career is permanently limited.

So there's a real law of the minimum at play here. But notably, the place you drop to at zero soft skills is way worse than the place you drop to at zero hard skills. The latter, you can find a use for; the former, you need to get out of your organization as quickly as possible, because they do active damage every day.

zug_zug• 9 years ago

tl; dr:

1. Author observes that he's witnessed a lot of emotional backlash to the suggestion that soft skills may outweigh hard skills in tech; suggests the emotionality of the reaction is indicative that engineers worry it just may be true.

2. Justifies the importance of soft skills by citing personal experience of teams of 100s+ people needing to be coordinated

3. Proposes that a [software] system's interaction with the outside world is a larger problem than the system itself [i.e. UX tougher than code]

4. Offers a metric to assess management by: if people dislike managers then those managers must have very low soft-skills. Proposes the traditional approach to management is a large failure in tech.

5. Describes soft-skills but gives no hard examples

6. Proposes creating vocabulary to represent soft skills such as requirement-gathering so that people can care more about these skills

---

My aside: I think 1/2 largely depend on the product, some products are almost entirely technical (alpha go, bitcoin), we'll only ever reach agreement by not oversimplifying the question.

I agree on 4, but I really think 5 is crucial. I think everybody has a very different idea of what "Soft skills" are and how well other people think they do at those skills. For example, I think somebody who creates laughter at work is a huge asset, others may not.

et1337• 9 years ago

Thanks for the tldr!

3. Proposes that a [software] system's interaction with the outside world is a larger problem than the system itself [i.e. UX tougher than code]

I hate this mindset that tries to divorce UX and code. If you're making a CRUD app, don't think of it as a tiny pure nugget of reusable API goodness surrounded by an unfortunate layer of messy UI that has to deal with the real world. The app IS that messy UI code. The rest is just a database schema. Don't try to abstract away your job.

Of course UX and code are different, but I think they're inseparable and anyone doing either should have a firm grasp of the other.

zunger4• 9 years ago

On (2) -- I picked a personal anecdote, but I've seen this be very true on much smaller teams, as well. (Including, as it happens, AlphaGo! Think about what went in to creating the circumstances where it could be tested... they did some heroic labor)

On (3) -- not just UX! Interaction with the outside world is a feature of every aspect of how people will use (or misuse) the system.

(5) Totally agree that this is crucial. I did give a few examples (later in the article) but I think that coming up with a good taxonomy of these skills, and patterns for learning and teaching them, is a huge challenge going forward.

Many intuitions are useful: for example, you note that some people want more laughter at work, others don't. A good leader should be able to make that meta-analysis, figure out what the team needs, and create that. But needs to do what? How do we describe the (positive) effects of laughter that you're trying to capture?

RoutinePlayer• 9 years ago

I wish the piece had been better edited to lead with a definitions of soft/hard skills, then a topic sentence for the thesis, then supporting arguments. There may be some good nuggets here, but it just feels like there's just rambling on and on.

quotemstr7• 9 years ago

The recent trend toward replacing technical acumen with "soft skills" is disturbing.

Let's dispense with a strawman: of course interacting with other people is necessary. But there are lots of people out there who said the "tech stuff" is easy and it's the coordination and empathy and stuff that's the real challenge. That's a dangerous perspective no matter which of the two ways you interpret it.

One interpretation is that you really don't think that technical quality is important. In this case, you'll end up getting complacent on quality, ship crap, and open yourself up to competition. You'll be in good company if you go this route: it's part of the reason big companies inevitably decay and get outcompeted by smaller, newer ones. (Notice how a lot of this "soft skills only" crap comes from big companies with products having enough inertia to last a while at a low quality level?)

The other interpretation is most insidious: you do recognize that technical excellence matters, but want to redirect credit to non-technical managers. This phenomenon is a huge problem outside tech; it goes back at least as far as Edison. We shouldn't be in a hurry to import this problem into our own field.

The truth is that in our field, there's a wide distribution of skill levels, and some technical problems go from "impossible" to "routine" once your technical people pass a certain skill and quality bar. Soft skills do not get you over this quality bar. Actual technical knowledge does.

skybrian4• 9 years ago

Who is arguing for "soft skills only"? Haven't seen that so far.

tbrownaw4• 9 years ago

Yes, hard technical skills are absolutely necessary for "building the thing right". The necessary level of skill depends on what that thing is.

But there's also "building the right thing", and that is a completely different set of skills. Many of which get lumped into the "soft skills" bucket.

lliamander2• 9 years ago

But there's also "building the right thing", and that is a completely different set of skills. Many of which get lumped into the "soft skills" bucket.

Actually, I think Zunger makes the explicit point that they are not completely different skill sets. I'm inclined to agree with him.

bjourne2• 9 years ago

I agree with this. The argument I have heard a million times is that technical people can't understand non-technical people's (whatever "non-technical" mean, partitioning people as either technical/hard or non-technical/soft is dumb) perspectives. Therefore, for a product to succeed, it needs to be designed by non-technical people. But the assumption is wrong and letting non-technical people design products more often than not just leads to badly designed products.

skybrian4• 9 years ago

What's an example of a product that was badly designed because the product designer wasn't technical enough?

tbrownaw4• 9 years ago

But the assumption is wrong and letting non-technical people design products more often than not just leads to badly designed products.

Yes, just like letting the technical people do the design.

Good design uses a separate set of skills, which few people have because few people realize they're important. There is very little correlation between having this set of skills and having the usual set of "hard" technical skills.

newman8r2• 9 years ago

I also feel like this particular article fails to address the intrapersonal aspects of 'soft skills' and mostly considers the interpersonal issues.

rosser9• 9 years ago

Please cite examples of calls for "replacing" hard skills with soft. That's far more a straw man than the one you "dispense with" — conveniently distracting from your own, I might add. I'm hearing a call for recognizing their value as complementary and essential in their own, independent ways. Soft skills do not supplant hard skills, but either is worth less without the other.

If you're arguing against that, then you're part of the problem.

It's also what we call a "false dilemma" to suggest that your proffered interpretations for this "trend" are the only interpretations for it.

lhnz4• 9 years ago

It's not necessarily that people are calling for hard skills to be replaced with soft skills, however they are writing articles in which they imply that soft skills are more valuable than hard skills at Google [1].

It's basic self-interest. If you believe that you're unable to sell your hard skills to an employer, it's in your interest to try to convince people that what you offer (superior generosity, motivational speaking, equality and empathy) will be more likely to bring success to an employer.

People don't need to literally call for hard skills to be replaced because that's not the end-goal. The goal here is that employer's realise that soft skills are more important so that the status of these careers is higher than that of software engineers.

  [1] https://twitter.com/joelgrus/status/945114254922825730

xkcd-sucks• 9 years ago

I've seen 'soft' vs 'hard' skills treated as a constant-sum quantity, e.g. somebody who conclusively demonstrates hard skills must not have soft skills so they must be a bad person to work with, won't be able to teach/learn, probably works badly in a team, etc. This is in the context of hiring meetings to discuss candidates. Interestingly, the opposite isn't as strong: a candidate with soft skills is presumed capable of picking up hard skills quickly, although it doesn't actually happened in most of these hires

aalleavitch• 9 years ago

There's a lot of roles on a team, though, and some of them require "soft skills" more than technical skills. For instance, your scrum master is probably better served by having strong people and management skills and a more general understanding of the technical problems the team is facing on a day-to-day basis rather than a deep understanding of implementation details. The idea wouldn't be to focus on staffing a team full of "soft skills" people, but rather to fill your team with people who cover a broad range of different skill sets applicable to different situations. So maybe you've got a hard computer scientist who can pound out complex implementations in a few seconds; she's probably ultimately going to really appreciate having a teammate who's better at condensing the scatterbrain designer's ideas into a hard set of specs that won't require as many back-and-forth feedback iterations even if said teammate isn't as good of a programmer as she is.

lliamander2• 9 years ago

I may agree with your general sentiment, but I think the OP actually avoids the specific mistake that you are criticizing. Let me highlight a few key quotes:

There always remain various hard [technical problems], of course, which are critical and which can’t be solved by any number of inexperienced people except by them getting experience; that’s why we need to continue to build and grow our technical skills. But if you continue to grow your skillset, you’ll quickly discover that the amount of time that needs to be spent on these extremely difficult technical problems tends towards significantly less than a full-time job; instead, the crucial (and incredibly hard) problems that affect a system have more to do with how that system interacts with the outside world — which is, more and more, people.
Interestingly, there’s a lot more crossover between hard and soft skills than many people realize: when you start to see your system as a component of a larger system which includes humans as elements, and you start to ask how humans interact with each other and what their behaviors are, then many of the same “hard skills” systems design approaches not only make sense, but can provide even better answers to traditionally purely “soft” questions.

Eric Raymond said something similar recently[0]:

Whole-systems engineering, when you get good at it, goes beyond being entirely or even mostly about technical optimizations. Every artifact we make is situated in a context of human action that widens out to the economics of its use, the sociology of its users, and the entirety of what Austrian economists call “praxeology”, the science of purposeful human behavior in its widest scope.

Also see Pieter Hintjens' book _Social Architecture_[1].

This is a sensitive issue, because it comes down to the question of who is at the top of the hierarchy, and it's part of human nature to be highly sensitive to our relative position within a given hierarchy. For those of us who have technical skills and an analytical temperament, we naturally want to be in an environment where those qualities are most advantageous in moving up the hierarchy.

I think Zunger's point is that, even within such an organization, there certain skills (which are not specifically technical) which are necessary to being maximally effective at the top of the hierarchy.

[0] http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7745

[1] https://www.gitbook.com/book/hintjens/social-architecture/de...

john_moscow• 9 years ago

One interpretation is that you really don't think that technical quality is important. In this case, you'll end up getting complacent on quality, ship crap, and open yourself up to competition.

I would dare say this mechanism has been in trouble for the past decade or so and that's the root of the problem. If you're a large company with a sizable share in an established market, technical quality becomes secondary. It's customers' habits, compatibility and your sales budget that run the show. Until the market turns and you go bust, of course.

If you're quickly growing startup, the budget you can spend on growth (i.e. the amount you can raise) far outweighs the technical side. Efficiency? Investors don't care about that, they care about you making enough buzz and getting acquired (or IPOing) while you're still hot. They will get a return even if you never had a single profitable quarter.

Unfortunately, as much as we technical people hate this, I don't see any reason for the "IQ -> EQ" trend to be reversed anytime soon. Not in the current market. The only way out of this circus is making your own bootstrapped business.

cryptica• 9 years ago

Some of the best developers I know have bad soft skills and they have had trouble holding onto a steady job because of it. Being fired often makes them more bitter, less trusting and further damages their soft skills which turns into a vicious cycle.

Part of the problem is the increased intolerance to conflict in the workplace. Employees these days get fired for merely having self-respect and conviction.

KKKKkkkk1• 9 years ago

I don't understand what are these soft skills the author is talking about. To me, it seems like he's talking about manipulating and deceiving people. Why is it good for a manager to be skilled at creating the impression that he/she respects his reports?

skybrian4• 9 years ago

It's certainly vague but that's an uncharitable interpretation. I'd say it's more like not inadvertently offending or demoralizing people, not accidentally starting arguments, and so on.

Mistakes in communication happen easily, so it's good to be skilled enough to avoid them or recover quickly.

alexandercrohde2• 9 years ago

I think this is a fair question because you sincerely are asking.

I think you have to admit that a manager who can make the team care about work, enjoy it, feel like a team, feel like they're working on an important problem together (even though none of this emotional stuff is objectively true/false or valid/invalid) is an asset to the company.

zunger4• 9 years ago

No no, not at all! One of the key things a manager needs to do is create a culture of mutual respect within the team, between everyone and everyone else. If the manager doesn't actually respect people, that's going to be a disaster.

This is tied to one of the core categories of soft skills: getting a group of people to work together as a team and trust each other.

heeton2• 9 years ago

I’ve stopped calling these “soft” skills, especially when hiring in the last year.

They’re anything but soft, and no less important to a team.

emmelaich4• 9 years ago

I've seen that argument before and I don't think it is helpful.

You're associating the word soft with easy and hard with difficult -- which is part of the problem.

Soft skills are difficult for many.

heeton2• 9 years ago

I don’t associate hard/soft with difficult like that (I personally find soft skills difficult), but this is a good example of how the terms are ripe for misunderstanding.

I try to use communication or personal or interpersonal skills, etc.

spraak• 9 years ago

This post is great for raising awareness but no real solutions offered, besides "there must be training".

XnoiVeX• 9 years ago

Absolutely. I was looking for the ending and it never came. Feel like I wasted 10 mins of my life.

hyperion2010• 9 years ago

I think it is time to post a link to The Night Watch again.... [0]

0. http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/thenightwatch...

mannykannot2• 9 years ago

Is sound engineering judgement a technical skill or a soft skill? How about the ability to articulate that judgement, so as to explain to others that one set of choices is better than the alternatives, and persuade them to agree?

zunger4• 9 years ago

Yes. :)

Sound engineering judgment typically implies a good understanding of the full context of the problem ("is this a good tradeoff?"), which often involves things beyond the merely technical. And without all of the other things you mention, which are definitely in the category normally called "soft skills," the best engineering judgment in the world will go to waste.

emmelaich4• 9 years ago

The fact is that the kinds of “soft skills” we’re talking about aren’t the ones that come for free to anybody

I wish that a certain ex-Googler could have been educated in these skills rather than being shown the door.

Viliam12342• 9 years ago

I imagine that the people who fired him are congratulating themselves on having great soft skills and making everyone feel safe.

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