[HN Gopher] Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft ...
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Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
Author : quanwinn
Score : 130 points
Date : 2026-01-18 13:14 UTC (9 hours ago)
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| anon946 wrote:
| The irony here is that universities are struggling to teach
| writing skills, due to massive cheating with AI.
| LatencyKills wrote:
| I mentor CS students at two local universities. The best
| students are using gen ai to enhance their learning and
| understanding (i.e. they use it as a tool instead of a crutch).
| The worst students are using it in attempt to "level the
| playing field" and are failing miserably.
|
| It is easy to determine if someone solved a problem using AI
| because they can't explain or recreate "their" solution.
| Detecting cheating in essays is still far more difficult.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| You could probably detect essay cheating (AI written) in the
| exact same way by questioning the student about it - why did
| they organize the essay in this way, what was their
| motivation for focusing on X, or expressing something as Y...
| Of course anyone can concoct an explanation on the fly, but
| it should be obvious if they are speaking from the experience
| of having authored it or just coming up with a post-hoc
| rationalization.
|
| If they had AI write the essay, yet can still explain it as
| well as if they had written it themselves (ditto for code),
| then it would tend to indicate that they at least read it and
| thought about it, which I think should be more acceptable in
| a learning environment.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > You could probably detect essay cheating (AI written) in
| the exact same way by questioning the student about it -
| why did they organize the essay in this way, what was their
| motivation for focusing on X, or expressing something as
| Y... Of course anyone can concoct an explanation on the
| fly, but it should be obvious if they are speaking from the
| experience of having authored it or just coming up with a
| post-hoc rationalization.
|
| I wouldn't claim that I am bad at writing (at least in my
| native language, which is not English) - at least many
| colleagues say so. But I do insist that when writing I
| don't think that way. If I were to answer these question,
| my honest answers would be:
|
| "why did they organize the essay in this way": I just wrote
| down the thoughts that came to my mind, and then gave them
| some structure that seemed right.
|
| "what was their motivation for focusing on X": Either
| "because it felt right" or "I had to write at most x pages,
| and indeed it would have made sense to focus on more
| topics, so I focused on this arbitrary thing"
|
| So indeed I would claim that a lot of sensible reasons why
| things are this way actually _are_ post-hoc
| rationalizations. :-)
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| > So indeed I would claim that a lot of sensible reasons
| why things are this way actually are post-hoc
| rationalizations.
|
| Perhaps, but still I think that responses to questioning
| about an essay that the student did actually write will
| come a lot more quickly and naturally, even if they
| indicate that not much thought was put into it, than if
| they realize they are being called out for cheating and
| and have to make something up on the spot, since they
| didn't at least read it carefully!
| joshuaisaact wrote:
| This couldn't ring more true to me - I think one of the
| consequences of the rapid change in the profession we are seeing
| is that skills that typically were required only at more senior
| levels become required further down the stack.
|
| If I was a junior today, I'd be studying business impact,
| effective communication, project management, skills that were
| previously something you could get away with under-indexing on
| until senior+.
| CrulesAll wrote:
| Software 'engineers' are going to have learn the hard skills that
| they have gotten by without thus far. The ones who were never
| engineers in the first place will have to learn 'soft skills'
| because they are incapable. I believe @ Tsoding put it best: The
| only thing AI will do, in so far as coding goes, is to remove a
| lot of people who should never have been in it in the first
| place.
| flitzofolov wrote:
| Can you elaborate on this?
|
| What are some examples of skills you think are now essential,
| that prior have been taken for granted or obviated in some way?
| CrulesAll wrote:
| Beyond engineering itself, strictly computer engineering? How
| many coders have no idea what goes on behind an IDE. Have not
| even the slightest notion how a computer works. Who thinks
| building a computer means watching a Youtube video and buying
| ready made parts, putting them together, and then think they
| should be employed by NASA.
|
| To begin: Math, Linux, Devops, C, and Assembly. Not a youtube
| video. Not arithmetic. Learn to the point that you could be
| employed by any of the above as a senior. And don't fear
| failure. Keep doing it until you understand it.
| pgwhalen wrote:
| I agree with your original post that the need for hard
| skills will persist, but I see it in the other direction:
| software engineers are going to have to get better at
| thinking in larger abstractions, not deeper understanding
| of the stack. Those who can only solve problems locally and
| repeat the patterns they've seen before rather than create
| new patterns from building blocks are the ones who are
| going to struggle.
| CrulesAll wrote:
| "software engineers are going to have to get better at
| thinking in larger abstractions" ........Math was first
| on my list. I don't know how else to say that.
| codingdave wrote:
| > I don't know how else to say that.
|
| Yep, exactly. The failure to realize that you mean
| different things when talking about "larger abstractions"
| is exactly the kind of miscommunication that software
| people will need to navigate better in the future.
| CrulesAll wrote:
| If you need to have that explained to you, you are the
| problem.
| pgwhalen wrote:
| Ah, I think "Math" as a single word on its means many
| different things to many different people, I didn't
| interpret in quite the same way. But I see what you mean.
|
| I'm not sure that my colleagues who I think of as "good
| at math" and "good at thinking in larger abstractions"
| are necessarily the same ones, but there's definitely a
| lot of overlap.
| ben_w wrote:
| Computer science is indistinguishable from sufficiently
| advanced maths.
|
| The AI can already do that part.
|
| The abstraction that matters going forward, is
| understanding why the abstraction chosen by the AI does
| or doesn't match the one needed by the customer's "big
| picture".
|
| The AI is a bit too self-congratulatory in that regard,
| even if it can sometimes spot its own mistakes.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| A lot of studying math is just learning jargon and
| applications for what are actually pretty straightforward
| concepts, which lets you better communicate with the
| computer. You get higher bandwidth communication and
| better ability to know all of the nuances in things it
| might propose. You can propose things and understand when
| it replies with nuances you missed.
|
| Like intro differential geometry is basically a deep dive
| into what one actually does when reading a paper map.
| Something everyone (over 30?) is familiar with. But it
| turns out there's plenty to fill a graduate level tome on
| that topic.
|
| Linear algebra is basically studying easy problems: y=ax.
| Plenty to write about how to make your problem (or at
| least parts of it) fit that mould.
|
| I suspect and think I've seen others say that you get
| better outputs from LLMs when using jargon. Essentialy,
| its pattern matching tells it to say what an expert would
| say when using the terminology experts use.
| alentred wrote:
| Not the original author, but I would guess that understanding
| the domain problem and interpreting it correctly in a
| software solution (not code, but a product with workflows,
| UX, etc.), which in turn requires ability to listen and
| understand and ask right questions on one hand (what a user
| wants to achieve), and a good understanding of the technical
| limitations as well as human habits on the other hand (what
| is possible and makes sense). One can argue that AI lacks
| what we'd call intuition and interpersonal qualities which
| are still necessary, as before AI.
| ilinx wrote:
| My rule of thumb is that if you're not measuring anything
| you're not engineering. It's not the whole picture, but to me
| the engineering part sometimes means being able to explain
| (and even quantify) why one solution is better than another.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| I've found coding assistants to be a huge boon for this.
| All of the thorough analysis that previously would've taken
| a bunch of tedious extra thought work to do for marginal
| benefit (with a well-calibrated intuition) becomes 5
| seconds of thought to the the computer to build a harness
| and then letting it chew on that for 15 minutes. It now
| also takes me one command and less than a minute to get
| pprof captures from all the production services my team
| owns (thanks to some scripts I had it write), which is just
| something I never would've bothered to automate otherwise,
| so we never really looked much at it. Codex is also very
| good at analyzing the results, and finding easy wins vs.
| knowing what would be invasive to improve, and then just
| doing it.
|
| Thinking of seeing if I can get mutation testing set up
| next, and expanding our use of fuzzing. All of these
| techniques that I know about but haven't had the time to do
| are suddenly more feasible to invest into.
| echelon wrote:
| Read further into the comment.
|
| Your $300k+ TC job is going away. The only way you'll make
| the same take home is if you provide more value.
|
| You can be a robotic IC, but you won't be any better than a
| beginner with Claude Code. You have to level up your
| communication and organizational value to stay at the top.
|
| Everyone has to wear the cloth of a senior engineer now to
| simply stay in place. If you can't write well, communicate
| well, plan and organize, you're not providing more value than
| a Claude-enhanced junior.
| CrulesAll wrote:
| "If you can't write well, communicate well, plan and
| organize" Straw man. Pretty sure, this is the dilbert
| equivalent of "I can problem solve". If you are an
| engineer, we are making boatloads being brought in to fix
| the incompetence of this level of thinking. INFOSEC alone
| is having a field day.
|
| Would you like to buy a bridge? Coded by Claude. One
| previous owner. An owner who used said bridge to go to
| church once a week, and vibe code in Starbucks afterwoods.
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| > If you can't write well, communicate well, plan and
| organize,
|
| Why not ask the LLM to write for you? Same for planning,
| organization and written communication.
|
| Seems like robotic ICs can "robotize" most of the work
| stack.
| networkadmin wrote:
| How about the skill of saving hard disk space, memory, and
| CPU cycles, for a start? The skill of designing simple,
| reliable, fast, and efficient things, instead of giant
| complex bloated unreliable pieces of shit? How about a
| simple, usable web page that doesn't drag my machine to a
| crawl, despite its supercomputer-like ability to process
| billions of instructions per second and hold billions of
| bytes of data in working memory?
|
| Remember when BIOS computers used to boot in seconds,
| reliably? When chat clients didn't require an embedded copy
| of Chromium? When appliances and automobiles didn't fall
| apart in 6 months, costing thousands to "repair" or just
| needing to be thrown away and bought again?
|
| Remember when there used to be these things called "machine
| shops" and "Radio Shacks" and "parts stores" that people who
| built things frequented? Now most people have to call AAA if
| they get a flat tire. Changing their own oil is out of the
| question. "Eww, dirty oil, on my clean fingernails?" Many
| couldn't tell you which end is which on a screwdriver if
| their life depended on it.
|
| I'd say these concepts are pretty essential, _especially_ for
| any nation entertaining delusions of waging Total War against
| other big and powerful nations. Wasteful and foolish nations
| lose wars.
| qoez wrote:
| I think this is kinda sad. I always thought coding was so
| beautiful for creating a (good paying) job for socially awkward
| people on the spectrum who pre-coding was considered dorks and
| went into idk what but probably some unsatisfying job. It seems
| like we're heading back to that which makes me sad and worried
| about the highly functioning autistic population.
| Xelbair wrote:
| I am sorry but is being employed a job or a daycare?
|
| Not only this is extremely patronizing towards all people on
| spectrum, but at the same time extremely hurtful statement
| for people who are treating employment as a job(ie - most of
| population).
|
| And what are you going to say to people who are stuck in low-
| end jobs?
| qoez wrote:
| I'm on the spectrum to be clear
| Lorean1 wrote:
| Sorry but did we read the same comment? It's not
| patronising. The people who are stuck in low end jobs were
| not in the scope of this comment (there are also people in
| war zones or very sick, also out of scope). And how did you
| manage to find this extremely hurtful to any group...?
| kube-system wrote:
| On the other hand, the increase in remote roles has made this
| a bit easier for some.
| sigotirandolas wrote:
| I hope this too but it's not a given, IMO. Previously people
| without technical chops failed quickly by being unable to
| deliver working code, now they can deliver mediocre code with
| the damage only becoming clear years later. It breaks the "can
| deliver code --> good technical ability" proxy and even after
| the initial damage wave, it's unclear if we will find a better
| proxy.
| EGreg wrote:
| As usual - the advice is essenially rats from a sinking ship all
| the way. "You all need to do this narrow thing to survive now".
|
| 2016 to truckers: "Learn to code LOL"
|
| 2026 to coders: "Learn soft skills"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46436872
|
| Look, I personally am taking full advantage of exactly the skills
| described. I was the one who posted the above thing on HN showing
| how I am 20-50x more productive now, complete with a 4 hour
| speedrun video. I usually try not to just talk and point out
| current problems, but build solutions AND show (github, youtube)
| with specific details so you can watch it and apply it for
| yourself. But I am telling you:
|
| 1) most people will not adapt, so we will need UBI for those who
| don't
|
| 2) eventually even those who adapt will be replaced too, so we
| will need UBI for everybody
|
| It is after all a thin layer that remains. I remember Kasparov
| proudly talked about how "centaurs" (human + machine working
| together) in chess were better than machines alone... until they
| weren't, and human in the loop became a liability.
|
| But the problem is more widespread in the last 70 years. Just
| look around. Industry always tells the individual they can do
| some individual action downstream to clean up the mess they
| create upstream, and it is leading the entire planet into ruin:
|
| https://magarshak.com/blog/government-and-industry-distract-...
|
| _In fact, the human population in modern environments has been
| living large on an ecological credit card and the bill is coming
| due for our children, because all the "individual responsibility"
| stuff -- where you can somehow diet, exercise and recycle your
| way out of things corporations do upstream -- is all a gient lie
| and always has been. So the negative externalities just build up
| until the next generation won't be able to ignore them anymore,
| but it could be too late. Whether that'als day zero for water in
| cities, or factory farms for meat with antiobiotic resistance, or
| fossil fuels and greenhouse gases to subsidize the car industry,
| or ubiqitous microplastic plastic pollution around thr world
| (yes, personal plastic recycling was just another such scam
| designed to keep you docile and not organize to force
| corporations to switch to biodegradeable materials.) The
| "anthoposcene" is seeing a decline in insects and all species of
| animal except humans and farm animals. Coral reefs are bleached,
| kelp forests and rainforests are decimated, and governments work
| with industry to eg allow Patagonian forests to be burned for new
| developments and then smokey the bear says "only YOU can prevent
| forest fires". Think about it._
| joshuaisaact wrote:
| I may have misread your comment, but I don't think soft skills
| are a 'narrow thing' at all. Effective communication, building
| trust, bringing people along with you - these are fundamental
| to being an effective human, not some niche pivot.
| CrulesAll wrote:
| "Effective communication, building trust, bringing people
| along with you" That's a David Brent powerpoint presentation.
| joshuaisaact wrote:
| Fair. I'll retire 'bringing people along with you' before
| it ends up on a motivational poster with a stock photo of a
| rowing team.
|
| Though you're right that there's no I in team. There is one
| in AI though, which probably tells us something.
| CrulesAll wrote:
| Not fair on you. I did not mean to have a dig. I get
| where you are coming from, and should have elaborated.
| I've worked with those one or two engineers who were rude
| by default. Who had an extraordinary knack of vaguely
| describing the problem set, and then having a full on
| meltdown, always in front of other people, when the
| solutions did not match the problem in their head.*
|
| *Goldman Sachs(sorry for invoking that name here) did a
| report on their high turnover, and the above framing was
| why many quit.
| EGreg wrote:
| Look, if we zoom in, then "learning to code" is also quite a
| broad range of skills that someone needs to master before
| they can meaningfully carve out a career in a competitive
| marketplace.
|
| The point is that if you zoom out, it's just a thin slice
| that can be automated by machines. People keep saying "I'll
| tell you in my experience, no UAV will ever trump a pilot's
| instinct, his insight, the ability to look into a situation
| beyond the obvious and discern the outcome, or a pilot's
| judgment"... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZygApeuBZdk
|
| But as you can see, they're all wrong. By narrow here I meant
| a thin layer that thinks it's indispensable as they remove
| all the other layers. Until the system comes for this layer
| too.
| dangus wrote:
| I would submit that this could be based on a stereotype that
| "coder = antisocial."
|
| Why are we assuming that people who write code don't have soft
| skills?
|
| The youngest generation who joined the profession are probably in
| it for the the salary versus the older generations who came from
| computer clubs and dungeons and dragons groups of the 1970s/1980s
| along with a culture where having a niche interest was socially
| ostracizing and uncool.
|
| I wonder if the youngest generation entering the profession is
| much more of a cross section of regular people?
| lordnacho wrote:
| I don't think it has ever been the case that you could neglect
| soft skills. You will hear this over and over, in every area of
| every business: people become successful by adjusting their
| behaviour to what works for the business. Sometimes this is
| called being a slick politician, sometimes it is called avoiding
| getting bogged down in politics.
|
| But it's never been the case that a dev could just focus on
| technical things and not spend any time figuring out the context
| they are working in, and behaving accordingly.
|
| My first day of work, this is what my boss said to me: "Look at
| this trading floor. There's screens everywhere, everything is
| numbers. Deltas, gammas, vegas. Everything is calculated by
| computers. But don't forget, every business is a people
| business!"
| MattGaiser wrote:
| There are plenty of devs who do nothing beyond taking a Jira
| ticket scoped by others, implementing it, and then grabbing the
| next ticket.
|
| While they may not have been very successful, they did have a
| place.
| verelo wrote:
| You're right but i have always preferred people who can do a
| little more. Nothing against the socially awkward and
| conflict avoidant nature in many of these friends, but people
| who push back and fight to communicate their views and
| passions often got our team better outcomes than someone who
| just turns up and does the work they're asked to do.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| As long as it is not opposite set of skills (talks a lot
| without knowledge to back it up so essentially using
| charisma to convince people to do the wrong thing most of
| the time) then yes, a lil bit of negotiation can save you a
| whole lot of work in the long run (XY problems being one
| example)
| verelo wrote:
| For sure, I've been tricked into hiring those people
| before too. It's good that there's still something hard
| in running an organization, the whole "what is value?"
| question feels like it'll be one of the few things we
| have to maintain work for humans over the next little
| while.
| miav wrote:
| Is this genuinely common? I've only ever seen that level of
| hand holding extended to new grad hires.
| kube-system wrote:
| It definitely happens at bloated organizations that aren't
| really good at software development. I think it is
| especially more common in organizations where software is a
| cost center and business rules involve a specialized
| discipline that software developers wouldn't typically have
| expertise in.
| veyh wrote:
| I have 13 years of professional experience, and I work in a
| small company (15 people). Apart from one or two weekly
| meetings, I mostly just work on stuff independently. I'm
| the solo developer for a number of projects ranging from
| embedded microcontrollers to distributed backend systems.
| There's very little handholding; it's more like
| requirements come in, and results come out.
|
| I have been part of some social circles before but they
| were always centered around a common activity like a game,
| and once that activity went away, so did those connections.
|
| As I started working on side hustles, it occurred to me
| that not having any kind of social network (not even social
| media accounts) may have added an additional level of
| difficulty.
|
| I am still working on the side hustles, though.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| > it's more like requirements come in, and results come
| out.
|
| Wow someone is very good at setting requirements. I have
| never seen that in 25 years of dev life.
| veyh wrote:
| Of course, sometimes people realize that what they asked
| for wasn't actually what was needed.
| pmg101 wrote:
| I mean... This "realization" is what triggered the advent
| of agile, 2 decades ago, right?
|
| People almost never know what they want, so put SOMETHING
| in front of them, fast, and let's go from there
| nomel wrote:
| I've seen it many many times, a few from myself.
|
| It's not so hard if you're an expert in the field or
| concept they're asking the solution for, especially if
| you've already implemented it in the past, in some way,
| so know all the hidden requirements that they aren't even
| aware of. If you're in a senior position, in a small
| group, it's very possible you're the only one that can
| even reason about the solution, beyond some high level
| desires. I've worked in several teams with non-technical
| people/managers, where a good portion of the requirements
| _must_ be ignored, with the biggest soft skill
| requirement being pretending they 're ideas are
| reasonable.
|
| It's also true if it's more technical than product based.
| I work in manufacturing R&D where a task might be "we
| need this robot, with this camera, to align to align to
| and touch this thing with this other thing within some um
| of error."
|
| Software touches every industry of man. Your results may
| vary.
| sbrother wrote:
| I've heard this, and I've even seen it in plenty of poorly
| performing businesses, but I've never actually seen it in a
| highly performing, profitable tech company. Other than at the
| new grad level but it's treated as net-negative training
| while they learn how to build consensus and scope out work.
|
| Not coincidentally, the places I've seen this approach to
| work are the same places that have hired me as a consultant
| to bring an effective team to build something high priority
| or fix a dumpster fire.
| tikhonj wrote:
| A lot of highly performing teams don't even _use_ tickets.
| win311fwg wrote:
| Do _any_ highly performing teams use tickets?
|
| A fly-by-night charlatan successfully pushed ticking into
| our organization in the past year and I would say it was
| a disaster. I only have the experience of one, but from
| that experience I am now not sure you can even build good
| software that way.
|
| I originally hoped it was growing pains, but I see more
| and more fundamental flaws.
| yurishimo wrote:
| I've worked at one, but it required a PM who was ruthless
| about cutting scope and we focused on user stories after
| establishing a strong feedback pipeline, both technically
| through CI/CD/tests and with stakeholders. Looking back,
| that was the best team I've ever worked in. We split up
| to separate corners of the company once the project was
| delivered (12 month buildout of an alpha that was
| internally tested and then fleshed out).
|
| Maybe I had greenfield glasses but I came in for the last
| 3 months and it was still humming.
| layer8 wrote:
| How do you keep track of tasks that need to be done, of
| reported bugs and feature requests?
| win311fwg wrote:
| Previously? There was an understanding of the problem
| trying to be solved. The gaps left the pangs of "this
| isn't right".
|
| Now I have no way to know where things stand. It's all
| disconnected and abstracted. The ticket may suggest that
| something is done, but if the customer isn't happy, it
| isn't actually. Worse, now we have people adding tickets
| without any intent to do the work themselves and there
| isn't a great way to determine if they're just making up
| random work, which is something that definitely happens
| sometimes, or if it truly reflects on what the customer
| needs.
|
| You might say that isn't technically a problem with
| ticketing itself, and I would agree. The problems are
| really with what came with the ticketing. But what would
| you need tickets for other than to try and eliminate the
| customer from the picture? If you understand the problem
| alongside the customer, you know what needs to be done
| just as you know when you need to eat lunch. Do you
| create 'lunchtime' tickets for yourself? I've personally
| never found the need.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Looks very robotic to me, never worked on a place where
| meetings and dealing with other humans wasn't part of the
| job.
| Retric wrote:
| I've been on plenty of teams where meetings didn't actually
| require any meaningful participation from most people.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Never been the case for me, additionally I have always
| worked in shared desks or offices.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| Meetings without any meaningful participation from most
| people? I guess too many people in the meetings?
| win311fwg wrote:
| That is likely referring to what has become known as the
| standup, where developers read off the commit log for the
| "manager" who hasn't yet figured out how to use a
| computer.
| falloutx wrote:
| People gotta remember its a job just like anything else. I
| dont see any other profession going above and beyond so why
| should that be levied upon on programmers, I don't see PMs
| trying to understand code, CEOs trying to understand the
| customer more than the investor.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Often it means being a sociopath
| straydusk wrote:
| There are HOSTS of dogshit devs that operated that way, trust
| me. Half the job of a PM has been to work with these types of
| people.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| That really sounds like a PM complaining that "I have to do
| my actual job of being the bridge between the business and
| the engineering team"
|
| ALL PMs are expected to be doing some translation, otherwise
| what's the point of their job?
| 9rx wrote:
| _> otherwise what 's the point of their job?_
|
| Who else is going to move a box from one column to another?
| steve1977 wrote:
| Claude?
| epolanski wrote:
| I too met many such developers.
|
| Very often some tech lead or head of could spot them and put
| them on tasks where they could be autonomous (generally
| technical but important aspects that bogs down several teams
| or products: pipelines, tooling, api design, performance,
| etc).
|
| Some could also be involved in features involving business
| logic but the lead/PM would make sure to put more details or
| streamline any feedback/questions through jira.
|
| Also, there's even more developers out there that get
| complacent on the business aspect after some time of seeing
| how poor product and business development is, and just phase
| out of it completely and try to find solace in the
| technicalities.
|
| If feels sometimes like many on HN live in ultra competitive
| bubbles with managers pushing people to grow and promote them
| like it works in Meta and similar, but that's really not the
| norm, it's the exception.
|
| Many of us work in companies where software is an expense,
| not an asset, mentality is different, there are no such
| structures, management and product are crap and you find a
| wide variety of situations and devs.
| themafia wrote:
| It's the vibe coders who would love to pretend that the
| opposite end of the spectrum from them is "artisinal coding."
|
| They honestly have no idea what "software engineering" in a
| professional context even looks like. So they come up with this
| prattle.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| Blaming people who use technology to make a valuable process
| accessible to themselves and then invoking a a no-true-
| Scotsman in order to defend the status quo is a good example
| of a lack of soft skills.
| JohnLeitch wrote:
| But the process is still inaccessible to them, provided we
| consider achieving reliability and security goals of said
| process. And no, this is not "no true Scotsman;" "vibe
| coded" software is demonstrably inferior in numerous ways,
| and outright dangerous in some contexts. No number of
| carefully scripted demos or PR campaigns is going to change
| this reality.
| sillywabbit wrote:
| Trotting out fallacy names on regular basis isn't going to
| win you any points.
| themafia wrote:
| > make a valuable process accessible to themselves
|
| I am directly calling into question the "value" of that
| process. It's also becoming increasingly clear that these
| tools just whitewash away the copyrights of the materials
| they were trained on and still mostly reproduce when asked.
| This would then actually be the destruction of value.
|
| > invoking a a no-true-Scotsman
|
| I did not. This is in response to an article. It
| demonstrates a clear lack of understanding of professional
| software engineering and instead imagines that writing a
| good spec is all there is to actually do. It displays a
| definite lack of understanding of the fundamentals of
| engineering or of profitable business.
|
| > is a good example of a lack of soft skills.
|
| You seek appeasement instead of understanding and you call
| into question my skills? I see now what you think this
| forum is for.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > It's the vibe coders who would love to pretend that the
| opposite end of the spectrum from them is "artisinal coding."
|
| It's the programming language coders who would love to
| pretend that the opposite end of the spectrum from them is
| "artisinal coding." They have no idea what assembler
| programming is(!)
| luckylion wrote:
| It depends on what you want to achieve as a developer, I think.
| Having some soft skills makes a lot of things easier, but if
| you don't have the hard skills to back it up, you'll plateau
| unless you switch to management before you reach your limit.
|
| At the same time, if you're very good at what you do, soft
| skills are a lot less important. Most of my peers would rather
| work with brilliant jerk than a friendly average person.
|
| But most people are not brilliant, and then you can't afford to
| not have soft skills.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _if you 're very good at what you do, soft skills are a lot
| less important_
|
| Empathy is more than butter. It also lets you uncover why the
| requirements should be what they are.
|
| There are roles where buried brilliance works. But it's
| usually in academia or the military. Not commercial work.
| sporadicism wrote:
| > Most of my peers would rather work with brilliant jerk than
| a friendly average person
|
| I worked with one of these. Every interaction was miserable
| and stomach-turning. He slowed the project down in a number
| of ways. A friendly average person would have been a net
| gain.
| JohnLeitch wrote:
| What was his role? How did he slow the project down? I ask
| because quite often, the value of "soft skills" is
| exaggerated. In almost 20 years of software engineering I
| have met some of the worst personalities imaginable. Yet, I
| cannot think of a single time somebody's personality got in
| the way to such an extent it slowed the project down. Some
| problems can't be solved by average people. In such cases,
| bad social skills with above average intellect will go
| farther than average intellect with good soft skills.
| willhslade wrote:
| Not OP, but I did work for a boss once that was
| technically very strong, but not as strong in terms of
| planning and scheduling work. It was a very difficult
| process, because I couldn't deliver what they wanted, as
| what they wanted changed both during and after delivery.
| Most things I delivered, which were what we agreed upon
| before delivery, were rewritten as they did not envision
| or plan work in advance. Technical skills are not a
| panacea; professionalism is a multidimensional skill
| matrix.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| If you can isolate the brilliant jerk to do something that
| needs very little coordination with others, that can work.
|
| But at least where I've worked, there wasn't much standalone
| work like that.
| thfuran wrote:
| >Most of my peers would rather work with brilliant jerk than
| a friendly average person.
|
| If that's true, you work somewhere very strange. Almost
| everyone hates dealing with assholes.
| bdangubic wrote:
| I respectfully disagree. Over 3 decades as SWEs I have seen
| many devs who did absolutely nothing but hack - two of them
| were autistic too. The "everything is numbers" is small
| fraction of the industry but perhaps since this is HN maybe
| resonates more with people?
| gambiting wrote:
| >>But it's never been the case that a dev could just focus on
| technical things and not spend any time figuring out the
| context they are working in, and behaving accordingly.
|
| I've worked with plenty of programmers who were absolutely
| insufferable human beings but we're some kind of supernatural
| coders who were doing the work of 20 people or were literally
| the only people who could understand the maths of physics or
| rendering in our products - so everyone kinda put up with it. I
| used to know someone who had dozens of HR complaints about them
| every year and nothing was done because the company didn't
| think they could risk firing them.
|
| So yeah. They exist. And I don't think AI is going to do much
| about them, but I'd love to be proven wrong.
| lwhi wrote:
| There are lots of developers who are able to lean into their
| inclination to be non-communicative. In many cases I think
| this inclination is at least partly due to neuro diversity;
| but I've met some who are simply genuinely unpleasant.
| netdur wrote:
| calculators doing a perfect job did not end accountants' jobs, it
| made it faster.
| Etheryte wrote:
| Not necessarily faster, but more easy for sure. There's plenty
| of stories of proficient abacus using accountants being faster
| than those using calculators. Those days are gone now though
| because a calculator is just so much easier to pick up.
| kube-system wrote:
| I don't think that's as good of an example as you think it is.
|
| "Computer" used to be a job title. It was entirely replaced by
| ... drumroll ... electronic computers, i.e. calculators.
|
| Technology doesn't usually eliminate the need for a job
| _output_ in general but it can sometimes shift the skills
| needed wildly.
| ironbound wrote:
| Your sort of paying them to understand the tax code that
| changes year to year tho
| yapyap wrote:
| You never really could. If you hear of a (very) succesful
| software engineer with horrid soft skills they're a 1%er chance
| wise
| commandlinefan wrote:
| I've been hearing this since the 90's.
| ambicapter wrote:
| I feel like it's a myth promoted by engineers with poor soft
| skills to justify themselves never learning said skills.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| 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.
| xhevahir wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| The shift is from tarpit to unemployment. A Jira ticket
| processing dev still has use. Probably not for much longer.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| watwut wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Where did I claim one implied the other?
| robocat wrote:
| > [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.
| retinaros wrote:
| you can be better and decide not to do it because you dgaf
| lolive wrote:
| Be careful, engineers, when interacting with soft skill experts
| not to join their reality distortion field where it's all about
| coordination, alignment, bizness strategy, clever planning.
| Whereas the real stuffs are just implementation details, quickly
| solved.
|
| In the end, they might convince you that 2+2=5.
| CrulesAll wrote:
| Wait until you try to explain basic concepts to such people!
| What's annoying is HR employing more of these people and not
| understanding why the dial does not move. What is baffling and
| infuriating is when such people are put in management. MBAs
| will destroy Western business eventually(those who tag an MBA
| onto a STEM qualification are not as bad but still infected.)
| ambicapter wrote:
| The trouble isn't that they would convince me with their
| reality distortion (they don't), the issue is that they are
| satisfied with their "progress" while I'm still asking crucial
| questions (which they ignore, b/c they don't see the
| importance).
| kube-system wrote:
| Part of the soft skills that are useful for a developer is
| being able to frame your crucial questions in a way that
| makes their importance relevant to their world.
| hypeatei wrote:
| Perhaps soft skills are too squishy and/or broad of a term
| to be useful then. It seems like these discussions always
| go "maybe you, as the developer, just need to learn how to
| do soft skills properly?" in response to business types
| exhibiting an undesirable behavior. Sure, smooth talking
| and playing into someones personality might be more
| successful (albeit with a lot more hot air), but _all_ of
| you are supposed to be working towards a goal. If someone
| gets hung up because you weren 't smooth enough, I would
| think they're a bad faith actor who doesn't actually want
| to get something done.
| kube-system wrote:
| Soft skills are broad in scope, for sure.
|
| But I'm not talking about "smooth talking" here; in
| response to the above example --- where engineering is
| asking questions that that the business things had not
| answered because they are presumably "unimportant" ---
| there is almost certainly a communication breakdown
| happening.
|
| Likely, one of the following is happening:
|
| * The questions are important to the business but
| engineering has failed to articulate why getting the
| answers are critical to the business. (Some engineers
| have a tendency to describe problems in the scope of how
| it affects their _own_ job or task, but neglect the
| larger picture or fail to articulate any consequences)
|
| * The questions actually aren't important for the
| business to answer and the engineer fails to understand
| how their task supports the goals of the business
|
| * The questions are important but they cannot be answered
| by the business. The engineer might need to gather more
| information before to generate actionable questions, or
| maybe the questions should be answered by engineering
| themselves.
| sandeepkd wrote:
| Its never about the soft skill experts being able to convince
| the engineers, the challenge if any, is always about them being
| able to convince the "leadership"
| Yokohiii wrote:
| In a team environment, half of the job is communication.
|
| That LLMs do a better job if you know what you are asking for is
| old news.
|
| But to be honest, I usually don't care to write properly into an
| LLM prompt. An LLM will ignore grammar and form and just extract
| the essence. If I make an actual mistake I will notice quickly
| and fix it. If I'd send slack messages like that to an peer,
| they'd either mock me or simply think I am dumb. We also know the
| stories about people that use LLMs for any communication or
| anything they write. Probably for the exact reason that being
| lazy with writing is acceptable now. My call is that writing
| skill will decline, not improve. This could probably be the case
| for anything that people use LLMs as a proxy for.
| ben_w wrote:
| Broadly agree, but one point I think is (sadly) relevant:
|
| > That LLMs do a better job if you know what you are asking for
| is old news.
|
| Even a decade after Word Lens had demonstrated augmented
| reality live translation through a smartphone camera, I was
| amazing people by showing them the same feature in Google
| Translate.
|
| Similar anecdotes about Shakuntala Devi, even in 2018 I was
| seeing claims about her mental arithmetic beating a
| supercomputer (claims that ignored that this happened in 1977
| and the computer was already obsolete at the time), even though
| my mid-2013 MacBook Air could not only beat her by a factor of
| 150 million, it could also train an AI to read handwritten
| numbers from scratch in 0.225 seconds, and then perform
| inference (read numbers) at just over 6,629 digits per second*.
|
| You say "old news", I say this discussion will be on repeat
| even in the early 2030s. And possibly even the 2060s.
|
| * Uses an old version of python, you'll need to fix it up
| accordingly:
| https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2018/03/16-10.44.18.html
| shevy-java wrote:
| > Today, I use Claude Code for almost all non-trivial programming
| tasks and have spent $500+ on it just last December.
|
| Truthfully, I don't want to get advice from people who become
| addicted to AI, sorry. The money investment that person did,
| already leaves me with tons of questions.
| echelon wrote:
| > Truthfully, I don't want to get advice from people who become
| addicted to AI, sorry.
|
| If you sleep on this, these people are going to take your job.
|
| I've been writing serious systems code for 15 years. Systems
| that handled billions of dollars of transaction volume a day
| and whose hourly outages cost billions of dollars. These are
| systems you have to design carefully. Active-active, beyond
| five nines reliable.
|
| I'm telling you AI is extremely beneficial even in this segment
| of the market. The value prop is undeniable.
|
| I'm easily getting twice my workload done with AI, and I'm not
| even leveraging the full extent of the tools. I've only just
| started to do more than fancy tab-autocomplete.
|
| This is going to be a huge shift in our industry, and I would
| brace for impact.
| sph wrote:
| I don't want to do twice my workload. I'm old enough to have
| learned that the faster and more efficient you are, the more
| demands they pile on you, and the net result is more stress,
| more expectations for the same pay. AI doesn't solve
| unreasonable demands, shifting requirements and looming
| deadlines, does it?
|
| And still, writing code is not even the bottleneck, the
| thinking, meeting stakeholders, figuring out technical
| problems is. What would I do with a machine that spits out
| bad code.
|
| I guess I'm not cut out for a field where the only metric
| that counts is how many tickets and lines of code one can
| churn out in an hour any more.
| wbsun wrote:
| These people are not going to take your job, the people who
| uses tools smartly while having the knowledge and experience
| in highly reliable distributed systems are. If human in the
| loop is not required any more, nobody is going to keep their
| job.
| realusername wrote:
| Personally I get a +5% productivity in a good day with AI.
|
| I do double my productivity on personal projects but they
| aren't entreprise style jobs.
|
| I really hope for those AI companies that my situation isn't
| too common because burning billions to make dev hobbies more
| productive doesn't sound too good of a business plan.
| bfung wrote:
| Totally agree.
|
| The uncomfortable truth is that the skill of _writing_ code
| is becoming commoditized.
|
| Reading, understanding, designing efficient systems, and
| planning changes based on that, at least for now, will still
| be for human experts (and AI already a great assist here).
|
| But churn out yet another webpage/website? People doing this
| will need to move on from this as their primary job.
| falloutx wrote:
| >But churn out yet another webpage/website?
|
| People exaggerate how many people work on just simple
| websites / webpages. Anyone needing a website has been able
| to get it for very cheap for a long time.
| atherton94027 wrote:
| Curious, could you give examples of how you've been able to
| double your productivity with AI?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| In my (not systems engineering) opinion, most time spent
| writing code is boilerplate and rituals; unit tests are
| pretty repetitive, creating a React component is a lot of
| repetition, etc. A LLM code assistant can do these boring
| things faster.
| atherton94027 wrote:
| Yeah I agree with you on that, I'm just curious about the
| systems programming use case as in my experience you have
| to think deep about interactions and working with an
| agent blunts that
| falloutx wrote:
| I dont want to take responsibility for 10 features at the
| same time because one guy on the internet is able to bullshit
| the execs.
|
| > I'm easily getting twice my workload done with AI, and I'm
| not even leveraging the full extent of the tools. I've only
| just started to do more than fancy tab-autocomplete.
|
| Are you getting 2x the money?
| JohnLeitch wrote:
| >I'm easily getting twice my workload done with AI, and I'm
| not even leveraging the full extent of the tools.
|
| It seems that every person who says this never elaborates on
| the nature of their work. What exactly are you writing? What
| languages? Technologies? What does the LLM assist with? In
| what ways does it hamper more than help?
|
| I ask these questions because I have yet to see any
| meaningful, real world application of AI at my job. There's
| definitely interest, but every exploratory effort seems to
| fall flat, sometimes comedically so e.g. recently we had
| Sonnet 4.5 recommend some JavaScript for a UI hang we were
| looking into. It also recommended we use WebWorkers to
| improve perf. Sounds great. Looks great, with nice markdown
| and whatnot. Too bad it was a legacy MFC application written
| in C and C++.
| Havoc wrote:
| Best to also avoid people with LSP and debugger addiction.
| appplication wrote:
| I think this tongue in cheek comparison would make more sense
| if it were possible to spend more than 50 cents on an LSP or
| debugger over the course of a lifetime.
| ssalazar wrote:
| Many people who get into software development before 2010
| or so have easily spent hundreds of dollars on dev tools of
| a similar nature.
| badgersnake wrote:
| Sensible. This article is another AI hype angle. The author
| works on an AI agent platform for marketing, of course he wants
| to hype it.
| karczex wrote:
| So I opened this article to find out at the very beginning, that
| author put's a lot of money to AI providers... So probably also
| used it to write this article. So, according to the rule "text
| which is not worth of spending time on writing is also no worth
| of reading" I closed it.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I found out that the author of a blog post paid a maid to clean
| their house, and sends their laundry out. Therefore, the blog
| post was written by the maid, or one of the laundromat
| employees. So I closed it.
| ambicapter wrote:
| false equivalence
| rafterydj wrote:
| That's a false equivalence. You might read a blog post about
| engineering from someone who paid a maid to clean their
| house, and sends their laundry out.
|
| But would you read their blog post on laundry tips?
|
| No - it's just as easy for you to send out your own laundry.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Err, no, the equivalent would be if the author had written an
| article about laundry, and how important it is to pay
| attention to all the details... then you realize the photo of
| his laundry still has a tag on it from the laundromat.
| badgersnake wrote:
| The author works on AI-powered Brand Agents built for marketers
| & publishers. That should be enough to tell you it's not worth
| reading.
| est wrote:
| I think AI coding agents will quickly pick all the low hanging
| fruits and plateau.
|
| Everything can be vibed will be vibed until everyone hits a wall,
| where no docs to form corpus nor instructions for prompts exist.
| There are problems that are yet to be named, but how can you name
| things when humans aren't the one to experience patterns of a
| thought process?
|
| And naming things is one of the only two hard things in computer
| science
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I'm just going to sharpen up my hard skills so that I don't have
| to suck up on my soft skills. If that doesn't work out as I wish,
| well, since I already have a job, and I'm already 40+, and it
| looks like my company doesn't go away in a few years and we are
| so short-handed, I think I'm fine.
|
| Just to clarify that I'm not a jackass in real-life. In fact, I'm
| perfectly OK with all sorts of soft skills -- after all, my
| current position requires me to do so. But I just try to maintain
| a minimum level of soft skills to navigate the shoreline -- not
| interested to move up anyway.
| CrulesAll wrote:
| "I'm already 40+, and it looks like my company doesn't go away
| in a few years and we are so short-handed" FANG employee for
| over a decade quit her job, opened a consultancy, and sold back
| what she was doing to former clients of her company(and their
| clients). She sold back what she was having to do to make up
| for this short-handedness, and the incompetence of many of her
| former colleagues.
|
| She did it at 3-400 times the markup she was being paid while
| employed :) because they were time critical.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I'm not in FAANG and mine is just a small one which may not
| afford a lot, but yeah I totally agree it's a good idea for a
| FAANG person.
| ironbound wrote:
| Counter-point, a three person dev team displaces a multi million
| revenue company.
|
| Why have a slow human CEO when machines are faster..
| sgt wrote:
| What about those professional software developers still refusing
| to use AI / LLMs? I know a couple and they're still churning out
| code completely 100% manually.
|
| Heck, I even know a guy who refuses to use an IDE with Java and
| the indenting is a mess, but he gets there.
| badgersnake wrote:
| Refusing to use them or trying them and not getting value?
| Honestly I've tried them all and they're all shit unless you're
| doing trivial stuff.
|
| Some of them don't even do trivial stuff very well.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| I thought this article was going to be about something else ...
|
| It is really about prompting and writing specs - the "soft" (but
| really "hard") skill of giving detailed specs to an LLM so it
| does what you want.
|
| I think the more important, truly soft, skill in the age of AI is
| going to be communicating with humans and demonstrating your
| value in communicating both vertically up and down and
| horizontally within your team. LLMs are becoming quite capable at
| the "autistic" skill of coding, but they are still horrible
| communicators, and don't communicate at all unless spoken to.
| This is where humans are currently, and maybe for a long time,
| irreplaceable - using our soft skills to interact with other
| humans and as always translate and refine fuzzy business
| requirements into the unforgiving language of the machine,
| whether that is carefully engineered LLM contexts, or machine
| code.
|
| As far as communication goes, I have to say that Gemini 3.0,
| great as it is, is starting to grate on me with it's sycophantic
| style and failure to just respond as requested rather than to
| blabber on about "next steps" that it is constantly trying to
| second guess from it's history. You can tell it to focus and just
| answer the question, but that only lasts for one or two
| conversational turns.
|
| One of Gemini's most annoying traits is to cheerfully and
| authoritatively give design advice, then when questioned admit
| (or rather tell, as if it were it's own insight) that this advice
| is catastrophically bad and will lead to a bad outcome, and
| without pause then tell you what you _really_ should do, as if
| this is going to be any better.
|
| "You're absolutely right! You've just realized the inevitable
| hard truth that all designers come to! If you do [what I just
| told you to do], program performance will be terrible! Here is
| how you avoid that ... (gives more advice pulled out of ass,
| without any analysis of consequences)"
|
| It's getting old.
| rafinha wrote:
| The classic "technically strong but lacking soft skills" unheard
| story about you through the office after your results.
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| Counter point - If one person can now do the work of an entire
| team the level of communication skills required will actually be
| simplified.
|
| So now instead of needing to manage multiple stakeholders and
| expectations of 10 different middle managers you'll probably just
| have a 1:1 with a single person.
| benttoothpaste wrote:
| I've heard this "soft skills are the only skills that matter"
| thing throughout my entire career but these days this is indeed
| greatly amplified.
|
| Our CEO started sharing screenshots of his xitter/linkedin feeds
| and most of them contain wisdoms like "Opus 4.5 is better than
| 90% of talent". There is also longer form business fan fiction.
| It usually follows this template: there is a hero - a humble
| manager/sales person, and a villain - a cocky, nerdy software
| developer. The villain claims that some task is impossible or
| takes months to complete. Then the humble hero (equipped with
| Opus 4.5) completes the task in 2 hours. The villain is then
| humiliated/fired and everyone lives happily ever after.
|
| These posts definitely contribute to the declining morale among
| employees. Nobody goes "above and beyond" anymore - we just
| strictly doing the tickets and nothing more.
| echelon wrote:
| Two things can be true:
|
| - You can have a horrible CEO that doesn't value their
| employees and is trying to devalue labor.
|
| - AI coding tools can be incredible exoskeletons in the hands
| of skilled engineers and enable them to get much more work
| done.
|
| Perhaps the real "SaaS-killer" is innovation capital [1]
| realizing it can take advantage of the various forms of
| arbitrage and changing of the guards happening now, raise
| venture capital, and take on the old and slow management-driven
| businesses.
|
| If you've ever had the itch to fire your boss, now's the time.
| It's a hard path, there are way more hats to wear, but the dry
| powder is out there waiting to be deployed.
|
| [1] ICs in _both_ senses of the acronym.
| JohnnyMarcone wrote:
| It's also the fun path! Although I think we should
| acknowledge that most don't have the means to do this. For
| engineers with a high salary I would advise saving as much as
| possible so you have more agency.
| binary132 wrote:
| Once upon a time a clever software engineer realized that
| engineering talent is the fuel which the business relies on to
| support its revenue growth, and management is for facilitating
| this process, while the CEO's purpose is to be blamed when it
| doesn't work out. He wrote a small bash script which replaced
| corporate leadership with a "quote of the day" generator and
| everyone lived happily ever after.
| pjmlp wrote:
| One just needs to survive one layoff round to learn that going
| above and beyond is useless, everyone gets shown the door
| regardless of the performance.
|
| That is one reason why companies don't like seniors, we know
| their tricks.
| whstl wrote:
| Even before AI, there was tremendous pressure on developers for
| NOT going above and beyond.
|
| I have been in far too many situations where a developer had an
| idea or a prototype it was blocked by a product manager on the
| grounds of it not being their idea. As a technical manager you
| then have to burn political capital just to get people to
| fucking collaborate.
|
| I've also seen way too many situations where developers must do
| the actual PM gruntwork where the PM wants to pretend they are
| some kind of svengali tastemaker figure.
|
| Have this for a few years and the psychological safety of any
| developer is in shambles.
|
| Those environments need to be fucking burned to the ground.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Our CEO started sharing screenshots of his xitter/linkedin
| feeds and most of them contain wisdoms like "Opus 4.5 is better
| than 90% of talent". There is also longer form business fan
| fiction. It usually follows this template: there is a hero - a
| humble manager/sales person, and a villain - a cocky, nerdy
| software developer. The villain claims that some task is
| impossible or takes months to complete. Then the humble hero
| (equipped with Opus 4.5) completes the task in 2 hours. The
| villain is then humiliated/fired and everyone lives happily
| ever after.
|
| I do have the impression that many programmers are much more
| resistant to bullshitting, and love to call out the mistakes
| when confronted with bullshit. Getting into management, on the
| other hand, means believing in instead of fighting lots
| bullshit.
|
| So, of course the mentioned CEO gets lots of such stories in
| his xitter/linkedin feeds; CEOs are not insanely eager to
| comment on such stories why the premises are wrong, and by
| which dirty tricks this manipulates people. Rather, by climbing
| up the company ranks, they actively had to believe in more and
| more fairy tables (or bullshit); if they are too resistant to
| the brainwashing that they have to believe in, they will stop
| climbing ranks.
| falloutx wrote:
| Companies have forgotten the value of morale. In this
| particular sense, AI hype has been very successful in
| demolishing morale, creating burnouts and overall decreasing
| value of everyone. Now everyone at the company can build
| everything in 2 hours, or so I am told.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > These posts definitely contribute to the declining morale
| among employees. Nobody goes "above and beyond" anymore - we
| just strictly doing the tickets and nothing more.
|
| I think those posts exist in a bubble. They only escaped the
| bubble because someone wanted to use them once over to unite a
| different group of people against a different set of bad guys,
| ironically continuing the cycle. This time it's devs loathing
| management instead of management loathing devs.
|
| All of the great people I've worked with don't play any of
| these games at all. They know it's a sideshow of engagement
| bait and content generated with a goal of being controversial,
| not truthful.
| tagami wrote:
| In education, I view them as life skills, durable skills.
| mikewarot wrote:
| Unless you're buried _deep_ in an organization, the main value
| that programmers provide is to help translate the needs of a
| business into a program that, when compiled, creates a reliable
| artifact that, when executed, works reliably and is easy to use.
|
| Writing code is just how that happens, sometimes. Soft skills are
| essential to communication with the users and product managers.
| pjmlp wrote:
| This has never been the case for those of us doing consulting,
| soft skills are a must have requirement when dealing with
| customers on regular basis.
| Animats wrote:
| It won't help. LLMs are good at soft skills, too. There's a whole
| "AI girlfriend" industry, and it's quite successful.
| throw-the-towel wrote:
| LLMs are not good at soft skills, just the girlfriends you can
| get in this society are even worse.
| luckylion wrote:
| I consider "understanding what people want when they well
| you" part of soft skills, and LLMs are good at that.
|
| I've know a few non-developers who use AI to solve the things
| they need. Nothing huge, it's not anything amazing, but what
| impressed me is how well the process works for them. They
| describe what they want in very vague terms with a lot of
| contradictions and in convoluted stream-of-thought
| paragraphs. But it mostly works, and LLMs produce something
| that's very close to what they want, and they get to their
| desired result with a few iterations.
| steve1977 wrote:
| So pretty similar to product owners or project managers in
| your average enterprise
| oblio wrote:
| Speaking of skills:
|
| > girlfriends you can get in this society are even worse
|
| Skill issue.
|
| Also, unrealistic expectations. People are both afraid of
| doing the hard work to have meaningful relations and
| filtering out duds and also want the world from another
| human.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| My take:
|
| Businesses have valued "cohesion" over "correctness" for some
| time (at least the last 10 years of my career) with the thinking
| that they can always eventually get to a correct solution, but
| teams that aren't cohesive do not work toward the goal they fight
| amongst themselves until they tear themselves apart (as a former
| Python dev I have seen teams that have one or two members fight
| for MONTHS over which set of linters to use)
|
| I also want to say that the only source of "bugs" is
| misunderstandings - of what the technology does, what the
| business wants, or what the customer wants (two thirds of that is
| "soft skills"). We've created DDD to try and address one third of
| those potential issues, but we're not there yet.
| sennalen wrote:
| Watch them
| steve1977 wrote:
| > we won't be able to AI our way into better communication skills
|
| Why not?
|
| I always find these articles funny. There's someone almost
| triumphantly declaring that AI is able to take over the hard
| skills tasks from oh so dreaded engineers, but the authors can
| somehow not imagine that their soft skills - which are often they
| only ones they have - could be done by AI as well.
| sublinear wrote:
| Do we accuse AI of having poor soft skills when it doesn't do
| what we want?
|
| I think the problem is knowing how to bridge knowledge gaps. That
| just comes from experience and there are no shortcuts on either
| end of the gap.
|
| Empathy does matter a little bit, but to focus so much on it is
| plain neurotic. Consider how much less friction there is when the
| interactions can be kept brief. Everyone is already familiar with
| the various situations and problems that can arise (like on a
| sports team). That's pure hard skills, not soft skills.
|
| Posts like this are flamebait for the extreme ends of these gaps:
| stubborn mediocre programmers and arrogant dumb management.
| brikym wrote:
| "I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have
| to. I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people, can't
| you understand that? WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!"
| durandal1 wrote:
| I've had a long career in software and my conclusions is that if
| soft skills are valued over hard skills, the organization is
| already captured by talentless engineers and leaders. There are
| holdouts in the world, where execution is king, find those places
| and run away from soft skill fortresses. This is more true than
| even with LLM-amplified productivity.
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