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Forget Learning To Code, Bosses Value Collaboration and Communication (fastcompany.com)
The top priority for developing talent is to train for soft skills, according to LinkedIn's 2018 Workplace Learning Report which surveyed more than 4,000 professionals. From a report: The report found that while automation is requiring workers to maintain technical fluency across roles, the rise of machine-led tasks makes it necessary for them to do what machines can't, which is to be adaptable, critical thinkers who can lead and communicate well.
I took off all my coding skills/accomplishments, and instead have all the buzzwords for working well with others.
Let's see how many offers I get!
I've never seen ability to code as being what makes a good developer, at least among workers at least capable of writing a good program. In the environments I've worked in, the programs are all too large for one person to work on so the only way to progress the program is to work with the other people responsible for the rest of the program. Are employers just figuring this out?
than the workers doing their job in terms of leadership, so the bosses can take credit for others work.
Except for the people who BCC all their communications with their managers to their bosses boss.
I manage a technical support team. Of the 11 people in my team, 2 are borderline autistic (nice guys, easily managed, but not exactly team players), 2 are extremely intelligent divas (unmanageable, but when they follow instructions every once in a while, they're really good) and the 7 others are reasonably smart folks who like to give and receive feedback, work well with the rest of the team, know how to write user-readable documentation, and propose reasonable solutions whenever possible.
Guess which two I'm trying to get rid of?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
...be adaptable, critical thinkers who can lead and communicate well....
OK, good managers, not typical managers. :)
... I hope that the surgeon has good communication skills when he has to tell your family that you died since he doesn't know what to do with a scalpel. I've noticed lately that incompetents usually try to promote soft skills when they know that they are lacking hard skills. In fact, I can tell a person is incompetent because they say that soft skills are the most important. It's not guaranteed but it's a red flag.
Right, so a bunch of dumbasses can tell the coder to try stupid shit, and then blame the coder for becoming upset and un-collaborative, eh?
I'm not a people person. I have a lot of weaknesses in various areas, and one area of strength - I'm really good at the technical skills of software development. I'm that major nerd who studies software design in his free time, and has done so for many years. My massive nerdiness shows in my record of contributing to well-known projects such as the Linux kernel and helping development internet protocols as a member of IETF. (Good developers read the RFC, bad developers ignore the RFC and guess at the protocol, I write the RFC.). It's quite obvious that on *the coding stuff*, and architecture, I'm very clearly the best on my team, by a significant margin.
I have a new boss, a new head of our software development team. He couldn't code his way out of a paper bag. He has soft skills.
Me: Write http standards
Him: Lead a team meeting
He's the one who gets promoted
This is basically an unsubstantiated conclusion drawn from misrepresented data.
The study suffers from a similar fallacy of generalising the ungeneralisable that various "successful people" often do when attributing success to methods which are highly subjective and circumstantial... the only difference here is is a study that generalises the opinion of 4000 "professionals" who are active members of linked-in by considering them to be a representative group of the whole - they are anything but, who the fuck has time for that shit, the real professionals are not arsing around on linked-in - those people are doing work for their employees that does not involve recruitment.
Bad bosses only listen when you agree with them.
Collaboration and communication has to go both ways for it to actually work.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
I keep seeing this, online and in schools. The people involved are doing it wrong. You do not talk to "top execs" about employment skills, it's like talking to lottery winners about how they earned their winning ticket. The vast majority of people aren't going to be top execs and are not going to work for them (directly). Most technical people will not ever be even in middle management, and *we don't want to be*! The money is good, the job is enjoyable and often you can see your family. You don't take the lobotomy until you're 50, and even then only if you are comfortable and have no way out. Similarly automation and AI are not going to be replacing engineering (of any kind), nor serious computer programming tasks any time soon. By the time they do, we aren't going to care anymore. It's way easier to automate a CEO than it is to automate an engineer.
If you come interview with me, at one of the top tier employers in the country, and all you have are softskills...you won't make it through the phone screen. If you interview with my boss's boss's boss's boss (VP I think? Who knows), you won't get the job. That guy has forgot more about semiconductors than most people will ever learn, and he's making billion dollar decisions. He wants facts, he wants you to do the hard technical work for him, and he's going to grill the hell out of you to figure out if you did it, and he can agree with your conclusions. He is then going to soft-skill it in the rarified air of the other top execs from marketing and sales. His boss's boss is the CEO. In a 100k person company, the sphere where soft-skills matter is perhaps 100-300 deep. Those are your odds of success with "soft skills".
If you are perpetually holding out for a senior exec position, then yes, work your soft skills and spend a lot of time networking with rich people. If you want to entrepreneur, soft skill it away, but be able to speak fluent geek. If you actually want to be an engineer or developer, forget it. Get your geek on, learn everything you can. Yes, you will have to work with people, but I promise you, they care way more about your technical acumen and that they can trust you, than your soft skills (to the point they may not trust you if you whip out power point). That's my advice to everyone, including my own children, and advice I follow myself that has kept me employed 20 straight years without ever being laid off or fired, and got me every job I applied for. It's also common sense.
Nothing in life is easy, there are no shortcuts. Soft-skills are a dime a dozen. I don't know if this is an America thing where everyone thinks you can just schmooze your way around and be employable, or if it's just universal laziness, but use your brain and ignore obvious lies. Put in the heavy effort to learn your livelihood or you will absolutely lose it.
I consider myself someone with both soft and hard skills, and I own a couple businesses, and do you know why the chatters get promotions and often a better pay? Simple, they ask for it, as simple as that, they just ask, I do see extremely goods developers that could make twice what they make if only they demanded it, it looks like their social ineptitude main cost is that they don't feel the drive to demand.
Too bad the education/indoctrination system has been fighting against kids having critical thinking skills for decades.
> who makes most ÃÃÃ?
iPhone users. Android users make $$$
There is a very large gap between being abusive (Dr. House), and possessing no soft skills. No one is going to tolerate you being abusive, I've never seen that turn out well. Even if you really are as smart as you think you are, even if you are also absolutely right, you're going to get burnt. And, no one is that smart, not even Dr. House who nearly kills someone in every show.
That said, soft skills involve a great many things of which social skills are but a part. Soft skills also involve project management, organization, schedule management, logistics, seeing the big picture and reading between lines. Many of those are anathemic to what successful technical people embody, for one reason or another. For example if your project management skills are good, very likely that's all you will ever do. Don't be too good. If you are seeing big pictures and reading between lines, you're probably making assumptions. That's also something technical people should, at the very least, be afraid of.
There's no particular reason why a competent technical person should worry overly much about soft-skills at all. My only comment is that technical fields are highly elitist and if you're not at least in the top 20%, you should consider rounding out your profile and pivoting to a less technical field in which soft-skills may be crucial.
funny
Right, so a bunch of dumbasses can tell the coder to try stupid shit, and then blame the coder for becoming upset and un-collaborative, eh?
Like this guy? He was give a simple task of drawing 7 red lines, all mutually perpendicular, 2 of them green and the rest transparent. Instead of just getting the job done, he became argumentative and uncooperative. Would you want a guy like that on your team?
The management myth that the more people you add to a problem, the quicker it gets solved. Pair programming, extreme programming. etc etc... I saw this in the 90s even if it wasn't called by a name then. 25+ years later in the industry and it hasn't died yet.
I've always said English was my second language. Had Romeo and Juliet been written in C, I might have understood it.
Was there a single point of disagreement? And did you make up afterwards?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The peter principle never stops. Everybody rises to their level of incompetence and stays there. Accept it, learn to live with it.
You cannot 'rank and rate' away the peter principle. You will just end up with an office full of politicians.
Nobody has been 'ranking and rating' longer than the US military has with its officers. If it worked, the joint chiefs wouldn't be a bunch of weasel politicians. 'Weasel' wouldn't be the key job skill for all ranks past Colonel.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Because they're already good at programming, they don't need to be trained further. If you have programmers who are extremely proficient in C/C++/Ruby/Python/etc but have minimal social skills and no experience in project management, then you train them on communication and collaboration to make them more effective.
An experienced programmer can become proficient in another language on his own, for the most part, if he has already learned one or two. Training is not really necessary. Honestly, you're better off giving an experienced hire some time to become familiar with the application design and codebase anyway.
Entry-level hires will usually be chosen based on knowledge of the project language, so there is no need to train them.
So, realistically, I wouldn't expect to see someone trained on a new language. They will generally pick that up on their own as needed. On the the other hand, people rarely improve their communication skills without explicit direction---or a lot of hard life experience. I can easily it being worthwhile to pay for that training instead of waiting for that "life experience" to happen within your organization.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
Back in the 90's when I was getting my engineering degree, people were whimpering about.
The professor wouldn't budge. He made it abundantly clear that you could have flawless lab technique, perfect calculations, the best design or the most innovative idea ever and it would never go anywhere unless you could adequately communicate with your peers, managers, investors, a review board, a corporate board, sales personnel, customers, and pretty much anyone else an engineer might need to communicate with.
Fast forward to where I am now and it couldn't be more true. For instance, I'm asked to contribute to capital planning for the next year. This requires me to engage the technical requirements of the teams I work with and then translate that into some amount of money that gets put in the budget. Naturally, when you request a large amount of money, people ask questions back. I have to be able to answer them coming from a manager as well as a technical expert. I get occasionally asked to sit in on a conference call with a big customer as a technical expert to back up our consultants or applications engineers. I need to know how to present myself there and not make a fool of myself or my colleagues. Customers can come in the "high level manager" variety , "person whose technical expertise is similar to mine", or "how did this person get hired and on this project" variety.
So, to sum up: yes, technical skill is important. You need that in a technical role. No question about it. At some point, though, technical skills aren't enough, the soft skills need also be present as your technical acumen and renown grow in your organization. There is absolutely nothing new to this, at all.
The ones with the smallest tits?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Naturally you have to be able to do the work.
If we get a doctor and your choices are some very nice person that doesn't know what they're doing or Dr House... as in a very qualified doctor who is an asshole... you're going to go with the asshole because your hurt fee fees are worth less to you then your life.
And that's a thing with business as well.
How many employees will work for a boss or a company they don't like if the money is good?
Lots will.
So if employees will work for a boss they don't like to get paid then a boss may well accept a difficult employee if they're good at their job.
And if the employer only wants rainbows and unicorns then that probably has more to do with the job market being in their favor than anything.
Long story short, first criteria is competence in the field.
Second criteria is basic work ethics...
Being a "good communicator" is going to find its way onto a list somewhere but if you had to drop something from the list you could live without it. You can't drop competence or basic work ethics. You lose the competence and they simply can't do the work point blank. If you drop work ethics then they're not going to do the work whether or not they can.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Anyone remember the emotional intelligence fad back in the old days? There was a best-selling book which I confess I have, somewhere.
In a nutshell it was basically "You might not be able to find your toes - let alone count them - but if you can smile nicely and tell people what they want to hear you can have a good career in sales/politics/management,"
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
That's a pretty good list of things you do.
> I know it's frustrating to be the strongest technically and not get promoted, but the strongest technical contributor isn't necessarily the best manager.
Indeed, and I don't necessarily -want- to go into management per se.* I've actually been working on creating a position that I fill, a position based around mentoring, teaching, and technical leadership. I then pitch to management that the less-experienced team members are doing a great job, being very productive doing the technical work following the blueprints I have laid out for them, doing things the ways I've trained them to do based on my 20 years of experience and study.
* Though it really would have been nice if management talked to me for a few seconds before announcing the new guy I was training had been promoted to become my boss. It would have been worth spending 60 seconds to say to me, "Ray I know you want to do the hard core technical stuff more than the organizational management stuff. The new guy, whom you've been teaching programming 101 to, wants to do all that bureaucratic management stuff you hate doing. We're going to have him do the red tape, management crud because we know you hate that stuff."
5% of their employees who can actually get the job done. This will involve having hard skills like coding, thinking, and knowing how to actually back up your hard drive.
Once they have those 5% of hard-skill employees doing 95% of their department's actual work, they will then hire 95% more employees to pad out their workforce with soft tasks like PR, product development, HR, sub-level managers, and other overhead.
The boss will use these soft-skill hires to demonstrate that they are successfully building an organization and will be promoted. The 5% of hard skill workers will never be promoted because they will be overworked, grumpy, and their colleagues will resent their capability. They will eventually leave for new jobs, retire, or be let go. The 95% of soft-skill employees will remain (or just churn over) and will eventually grow to 100% soft-skill employees as the hard-skill workers leave.
The department will then die as its output plummets. A new potential boss will recognize the opportunity to fill the void and the cycle will repeat.
This is the life cycle of all professional organizations.
I think the expert showed great restraint. I wish I could suffer fools as kindly - of course, because I don't, employees in my dev groups don't have to deal with fools often, or for long, either as co-workers or as outside collaborators.
One part of my managerial role is to cut through this crap and tell other managers (and sometimes my own bosses) to take a long walk on a short pier (politely at first, not so politely if they persist in the theater of the absurd); one part of my technical role is to recognize this crap without having to bother team members who are actually doing productive work.
Unfortunately, that video is too reminiscent of a bunch of meetings I've been involved in my 40 years in software development.
Basically, they want us to do their jobs for them? Because if we can, we can set up and run our own businesses.
When you survey them, LinkedIn's professional managers say they want "soft skills". When you check their job requirements, they want you to be have "hard skills" (including N years of experience in their specific environment). When you check who is actually working for them, you find people who are cheap and have little in the way of skills (soft or hard) beyond checking StackExchange.
I've been pretty clear with my boss that I don't care for the bureaucratic stuff and don't really want to go into management per-se, rather seeking (and even creating) a mentor-like position, a position that might be called "software architect" rather than "manager". So it wouldn't be a lie to acknowledge that.
Even if it WEREN'T clear, the manager who made that decision is already a liar, so if he took a moment to acknowledge my superior technical skills by saying something to me before announcing it, even lying to me about his exact motivations would at least acknowledge that a) having twice as much experience as anyone else on the team, I'm an obvious candidate for any leadership position, and b) I am the guy everyone goes to for help. It would be nice to have a token of respect, even if he said "I know you have decades of experience, but we've decided to offer the position to this new guy", without explaining any reason. I do like for my decades of study and experience running software development teams to be acknowledged. A nod of respect would have been nice.
Usually they want a thing they can't express in words. Instead of saying "Hey, can you produce a rough design of an architecture that fixes most of our problems and come up with a rough plan to implement this in two weeks?", they make up their minds by perceived gossip, think of some absurd plan, don't communicate it, don't manage it, and get mad when people don't brown nose.
So, practice positive speech that makes everyone feel good without committing to anything. Not only will you reduce stress at the workplace but eventually you'll be able to work on your own communication skills and say nice stuff you actually mean to your beloved ones.
Screw managers that don't really know their shit by playing along and seeing them sinking deeper and deeper in the pile of manure they themselves produce. And cover your arse by relaying the drivel they spout in emails confirming meetings/discussions you had.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Try working for a large corporation that uses stack ranking for focal reviews, and then come back to us. You don't have to actually go THROUGH the review to see how the people that are best a blowing smoke step over the few doing the actual work.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
The people who get promoted to bosshood are the ones who spend their days wandering around the office like wet dreams gossiping and yapping like those irritating little white dogs that can't shut the fuck up for more than 30 consecutive seconds. They are not the ones who do the work. Then they promote others who are like them, so on and on it goes.
Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis
Large corporation does not necessarily mean stack rating, but I know of a few and worked for one. I quit as soon as was good for me. I did have to endure a few really bad years around 2008, but dropped it like a bad habit afterwards.
If you work for a company that uses stack rating, they are telling you nicely that they're more interested in your business acumen than your engineering/technical ability. In that case, you have a decision to make. You either want to play ball, do the promotion and powerpoint slog and combat your peers for peanuts. Or you are a technical person first and need to find appropriate challenges. There ARE good jobs out there, even in large corporations, that value engineers and developers for their technical skills. Go to them.