Slashdot Mirror
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 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
... 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.
I think the thing bosses are figuring out, is the technology buzzard of the day isn't the biggest thing. I have professionally used a couple dozen languages over my career. Giving me an other one to work on isn't a big deal. Also a lot of coders are very protective of their code, and hate sharing it. So coding isn't collaborative but work on your own code, and dump it on someone else when you leave, where they look at it, and grumble at all the problems with it and promptly re-write it again.
I think the ability to code for someone applying for a programming position is something we should take for granted, however other factors such as how they will work with others, and make code that will prevent a hand off learning curve, and follow a company standard is important.
If you think if you make your code difficult and only you can manage it. Let me tell you from experience, you are wrong, While it may take some time to get a handle of it, most developers (especially ones practiced at reading others code) can pick up on your crazy mess you made, and continue on without a heartbeat.
I had a rouge employee quit, contact the customers telling them that the company will not be able to keep the product running. Causing the customers to panic. Only for us to put in a update for a feature they were asking months for (which he never had started), as well changing the security settings around to prevent him from causing more damage.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
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.
the technology buzzard
What does Carly Fiorina have to do with it??
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?
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.
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.
I lead a hardware development group and I don't do that much development myself anymore these days. What I spend my time on is:
1. Setting development priorities (we don't have enough resources, so I need to find the least-bad solution)
2. Hand-holding engineers having interpersonal problems
3. Shielding my team from organizational politics
4. Fighting my peer managers to get development resources for my team's projects
5. Promoting our group and our development ideas to upper management
6. Evaluating the contributions of the various technical folks on my team and trying to fairly distribute my (very) limited raise pool.
7. Doing hands-on hardware development.
As you can see, this isn't necessarily a good for the best technical engineer. Soft skills go a long, long way.
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.
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.