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Programming

Forget Learning To Code, Bosses Value Collaboration and Communication (fastcompany.com) 197

Posted by msmash from the what's-hot-these-days dept.
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.
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Forget Learning To Code, Bosses Value Collaboration and Communication More

Forget Learning To Code, Bosses Value Collaboration and Communication

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  • Great, let me change my resume (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 27, 2018 @01:23PM (#56195307)

    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!

    • Re:Great, let me change my resume (Score:5, Informative)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Tuesday February 27, 2018 @01:47PM (#56195513)

      1. This LinkedIn report is based on a survey, so it is about what people say, not what they do.
      2. Much of the survey concerns hypothetical future actions.
      3. The survey questions are not mostly about developers, but about characteristics needed in all employees.
      4. The report PDF is displayed with a light gray font on a white background, making it nearly unreadable. This doesn't reflect directly on the contents, but it does show that the team that created it were incompetent at least for the presentation.

      • It's also the same advice I've heard over the past decade and a half, and the same advice told back in the 1920s. It's the statistical correlate with which engineer gets the highest salary. It was also bluntly stated by Andrew Carnegie when he hired the first person in the world to ever earn a million-dollar salary as an employee of any firm.

    • 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 pro

      • Forget about promotion, who makes most âââ?

      • Re:Should do the trick, based on my experience (Score:5, Insightful)

        by crgrace ( 220738 ) on Tuesday February 27, 2018 @04:07PM (#56196559)

        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.

        • 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 prod

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by crgrace ( 220738 )

            I agree 100% with what you wrote. Your manager dropped the ball.

            Also, I should say at my organization (and I wish this were more common) the managers don't necessarily make more money than the people they manage. We have some very high-performing individual contributors who make significantly more than I do (and they deserve it).

          • That last paragraph falls under the category of "leadership" not management. Also, you are absolutely right, it's horrible that your boss handled it that way, and everyone who reads your story should take a lesson from it.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Bengie ( 1121981 )
          In my limited experience, technical ability and communication are inversely related. I've had an ex-mechanical engineer for a manager and he was great. He understood the value of planning, fleshed out specs, and other basics of making any project work. He was not very good at the abstract reasoning needed for tech. Nearly every senior software engineer is great at reporting that they're behind schedule, full of bugs, and the customers keep calling to complain. The best programmers are horrible at giving any

  • 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?

    • Re:Nothing New (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Tuesday February 27, 2018 @01:47PM (#56195519)

      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.

      • Re: Nothing New (Score:4, Funny)

        by Type44Q ( 1233630 ) on Tuesday February 27, 2018 @02:26PM (#56195829)

        the technology buzzard

        What does Carly Fiorina have to do with it??

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          rouge employee

          She wouldn't share her makeup.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dwpro ( 520418 )
        I've used a number of languages in my 12+ years in the trenches of coding, and the language actually is a big(ish) deal. There's an expressiveness and continuity of thought that comes from being well-versed in a language. You know the tools, platform limitations, conventions, shortcuts, the gotchas. Maybe you're a polymath that remembers all of that stuff and has kept track of all the language advances of the last X years that can get rid of 30% of the boilerplate and do automated bounds checking, but fo

        • Sensei,
          I'm in programming mere 35 years.
          I know about 30 languages and program in 5 right now fluently.
          What are the shortcuts you are talking about and the gotchas, please enlighten me!

      • I had a rouge employee quit

        Was there a single point of disagreement? And did you make up afterwards?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by whh3 ( 450031 )

        I wish that I simply had mod points to respond to this. Since I don't, I will post a comment.

        This is one of the most thoughtful responses that I've read on /. in a while. Thank you for posting this.

        I cannot agree more with your comment. Especially the final part. I think that it is part of human nature to want to be so invaluable that the organization we leave will be stuck without us. And that is true for any type of organization. I know it is definitely true for me. I've left behind several groups and rea

      • 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.

        Only if you are not being managed properly.

        A well managed team will be using processes such as code review to ensure that there is a sense of shared ownership of every line of code written. It is not your code, it is the companies. You all work for the company (you may also own shares), but ultimately everyone should know they are part of a team and what matters most is the team, and the shared team goals as defined by the company.

    • That's why we have managers, so they can distribute tasks to each person. The one who is doing the coding does not need to "collaborate", he only needs to do his task. Of course, the problem is most managers now have absolutely no clue what to do, so they just let employees try to organize themselves, that is they let coders do the manager's job.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sfcat ( 872532 )

      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?

      For companies that sell software to other companies yes, this is true...for that what, 2% of the industry. For the rest, the modules are much smaller, often composed of smaller modules, each of which has its own team. For projects like that that I've been on, there hasn't been a single project that a single decent developer couldn't handle by themselves. Having an entire team handle that module of code rather than a single developer is about parallelism, not necessity. And the cost of that parallelism i

    • 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.

      That's like saying height doesn't matter as long as you're tall enough.

  • 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.

    • Pretty much every manager I have worked for tended to look at the work and skills of others through the lens of his or her own world. They understand leadership, communication and collaboration because for them it's a core skill set. Focus, reflection, a deep understanding of specific areas of expertise? Not so much. I suppose that's why they would value the first set of skills more. It's also what they focused on in performance reviews, and what they would most suggest to others (developers or other s

      • Pretty much every manager I have worked for tended to look at the work and skills of others through the lens of his or her own world. They understand leadership, communication and collaboration because for them it's a core skill set. Focus, reflection, a deep understanding of specific areas of expertise? Not so much. I suppose that's why they would value the first set of skills more. It's also what they focused on in performance reviews, and what they would most suggest to others (developers or other staff) as areas of improvement. They found technical skills harder to deal with, unless broken down into certificates.
        It's probably also why they gave us open plan offices

        This makes perfect sense. Someone who doesn't know how to code has no way of judging the quality or even speed of the code. They can kind of judge the quality of the end product but if it's a large product then even each coder's individual doesn't really show much in the final product. So what does a non-coder judge on? Lines of code, responsiveness of programmer, how helpful the programmer is to other employees, how quickly the programmer fixes the problem, etc... They are judging on the only things

    • Because nothing makes managers happier...than the workers doing their job in terms of leadership

      If your perception is that only leaders need communication and critical thinking ability, your industry is probably ripe for automation.

      And that's the point of the article. We no longer need button pushers because automation is taking those roles. Jobs will increasingly require people to be smarter than their roles would have needed a decade ago.

      Coding classes may expose people to black & white logic but they won't make people better decision makers. Coders are mostly defensive thinkers, and that only c

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        Coders yes. However, the "what will break this" thinking is a critical skill for someone I'd consider a developer. It's also a critical skill for a good manager, but most of them seem to be missing it.

        Such as when a big project got set up here and someone said things like "you'll want to do x, y and z because otherwise A, B and C are going to go wrong." Someone wanted more positive thinking. Today I actually went to a meeting with a bag of popcorn, to hear about how A, B, and C have gone catastrophicall

        • I think there's some confusion with TFA, it is not talking about dev jobs -- it is targeting ALL jobs.

          Which is what I was speaking to: yes this method of thinking IS something most coders develop but it can take 5-10 years, so a few light coding classes is not going to help anyone in a different career path.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

            Maybe I was misunderstood. "Coders," as in someone who has taken a few classes and can write a bit of code, might not learn critical thinking, but decent developers tend to have it. And yes, it's absolutely an asset to pretty much all jobs, and unfortunately lacking in most of them.

            We are hopefully experiencing a shift away from a management class over workers who are regarded as more or less machine like: don't think much, butts in seats, head down, follow this simple procedure. Adults should be capable

        • How did it go? Did they decide that it was your fault for not having a "can do" attitude?

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

            I stayed far away, and now they're afraid to ask me to fix it. I applied my can-do attitude to projects that have a chance of success.

            Lucky too. If they'd asked me earlier I probably would have gotten involved. I save injured birds and stray cats too.

  • No shit Sherlock (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Tuesday February 27, 2018 @01:29PM (#56195369)

    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?

    • The two divas?

      • I should hope so from his description, but I have an off topic question. Does your sig line refer to Pope Francis, because if so, downright brilliant!

      • Divas are useful in a perishingly small set of use-cases. The cognitive dissonance is stunning, though - misanthropes who crave laudatory attention, people who complain about being too heavily laden who won't document and won't teach, and (all too often) self-proclaimed senior staff who turn out not to know basics.

        I've worked with divas and I've worked with givers/sharers. I'll take the givers and sharers - if you want to document something or teach me and the team, so much the better.

    • Guess which two I'm trying to get rid of?

      The divas because you'd rather have control than anything else. Did I guess right? By the way, as someone who has probably worked in IT longer than you, you'd be a lot better off getting rid of the borderline autistic guys because guys who aren't team players aren't worth the trouble. It far far better to deal with smart people who may be 'unmanagable" (and I bet another manager besides you could somehow reach them) than guys who aren't team players.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • When we got rid of our unmanageable prodigy, things got a lot better. Coworkers stopped crying after being told repeatedly that it's okay for them to be stupid because not everyone can be a genius. The pace of "updates" stopped, but the quality of code went up.

        Also, he got arrested by the FBI a few years later for hacking into a school and publishing the dean's social security number because they weren't taking security issues seriously. He said they were too stupid to understand until somebody showed

        • Re:No shit Sherlock (Score:4, Interesting)

          by HornWumpus ( 783565 ) on Tuesday February 27, 2018 @02:48PM (#56195993)

          'Unmanageable' is a judgement. When it's made, the person on one side or the other should be removed from that team.

          Often as not, the _manager_ is just incompetent. There is no way to know if that's Roscoe or not.

          As always, there is no substitute for experience. A known 'difficult to manage' (which can mean 'cares about his craft'), but really top developer, can be used as a test for new middle managers. If the MM ends up kicking him from the team...fire the manager.

          Of course that presupposes you have a 'known to Sr management as 'good but difficult' dev'. Can go completely wrong if the Sr manager is clueless, but you're boned in that case, so fuck it.

          'Asshole' on the other hand...but be sure to identify the right asshole. People that won't do their jobs, unless you're an asshole to them, are the primary assholes in that situation.

          In a bad team, everybody works at the level of the lowest performing person that is perceived to be 'getting away with it'. Which ratchets down. In that case, beware of firing 'assholes'. Sometimes they are just people who are late to the featherbedding.

          • He was an asshole to everyone. I had serious problems with that manager, but he cleaned up well, and these were not those problems. Pretty much every person this dude interacted with knew who had the problem, or at least was tired of being told that program crashes happen because you're too stupid to use his perfect software the right way.

            You seem consistently biased against anyone with power.

            • I've been on both sides, both software project management and software development have high rates of arrogance, incompetence and assholeness. But management usually hired development, the most common mode is 'both suck'.

              'Asshole' is a common charge. All I said was: 'be sure you identify the right asshole.'

              Someone started literally crying over a bug report being brushed off rudely? You need better bug tracking software. Bugs cleared is a useful metric (no metric is perfect). Either it was a WETWARE pro

      • Re:No shit Sherlock (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Herkum01 ( 592704 ) on Tuesday February 27, 2018 @02:08PM (#56195691)

        The Divas are not team players either and if they won't follow the direction SET by the manager, then they are definitely not worth the trouble that they create.

        • Re:No shit Sherlock (Score:5, Insightful)

          by sfcat ( 872532 ) on Tuesday February 27, 2018 @06:50PM (#56197393)

          The Divas are not team players either and if they won't follow the direction SET by the manager, then they are definitely not worth the trouble that they create.

          Its likely that you are the real problem. If the divas are the top devs (and likely they are, otherwise they wouldn't be divas) then they likely should be the ones setting the technical direction of the project and not you. You are likely setting a bad course and won't take a hint when they tell you so. So instead of saying, "maybe I'm in the wrong here", you label them "assholes". Perhaps you are the real problem and not the divas. Perhaps they are only divas when a manager without their technical skills tries to "set the direction" in the wrong way. Just a thought...

          • If the divas are the top devs (and likely they are, otherwise they wouldn't be divas)

            You reckon? I've met a few but never one that was really justified.

            Usually, they'd just been there a long time and/or survived at least one major reorganisation.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Guess which two I'm trying to get rid of?

        The divas because you'd rather have control than anything else. Did I guess right?

        Now we know who one of the two divas is.

      • I could follow you until you menationed 'smart'.
        The autists usually are mega smart. And being a diva does not make you unsmart, by definition.
        And on a side track, perhaps you like to watch the french movie 'Diva' once ... a masterpiece.

        • And being a diva does not make you unsmart, by definition.

          Are you saying that they *are* all smart? Because that's not what the dictionary - or my experience - say.

          Or are you saying that they might be, but they might not? In that case you aren't really saying anything.

    • Your two remaining brain cells?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Njovich ( 553857 )

      The two most expensive ones? The union workers?

      The reality is that your company would have never hired any of them without their technical skills. And yet the 'autistic' ones are still there despite their lack of communication skills. Which again just comes to show that communication skills may be 'valued' but not as much as other factors.

    • Guess which two I'm trying to get rid of?

      The ones with the smallest tits?

      • I guess you were aware that the Divas in this case were male and it would be 'less gay' to fire the male gays with the biggset tits?
        Appologizes if I mistyped gay and gys again ... keepining mixing that up.

  • ...be adaptable, critical thinkers who can lead and communicate well....

    OK, good managers, not typical managers. :)

  • Next time when you need surgery... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Master5000 ( 4644507 ) on Tuesday February 27, 2018 @01:41PM (#56195471)
    ... 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.

    • You need both. First or second interview should be over a beer.

      Are they pleasant enough to be around? Because while those genius rock-star developers who are on the spectrum might have fantastic output, they also tend to drag everyone else around them down, and make the office a fucking dreadful place to be. They also tend to be pretty thin-skinned, egotistical and brittle.

      "Someone edited MY code?"

      No fucking thank you. You can teach almost any reasonably intelligent person to code, it's not rocket scienc

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        You can teach almost any reasonably intelligent person to code

        No, you really can't. This is something that managers still don't want to accept, hence all the "coding boot camp" and "teach girls to code" activism. Software development is not a training skill. It requires a training skill (i.e. how to use an IDE, VCS, etc.), but the very essence of software development requires an analytical mindset. To break down complex problems into things that a computer can handle is not a simple "if this then do that" skill, not something that can be memorized and trained. First a

      • Q: Do you know how I know you can't code for shit? A: You think the coding is the hard part.

        • That's your takeaway from my post?

          • Yep:

            You can teach almost any reasonably intelligent person to code, it's not rocket science.

            Pants on head wrong! You clearly don't 'code'.

            • That's a pretty broad brush to be painting with. But in a similar vein, if I had to hazard a guess something about you is that you're one of the diva types who are very clearly somewhere along the spectrum -- an insufferable jackass.

              Which is probably why you keyed in on that one sentence. (While of course while disregarding the broader point).

              People who cannot function as part of a team are cancer, regardless of how 'good' they are (or in most cases, how good they *think* they are).

              But, think what you will

          • "Half the work is debugging the spec."

            I forget if it was Isaac Newton or Ben Franklin.

  • Forget listening to self proclaimed experts (Score:4, Insightful)

    by tomxor ( 2379126 ) on Tuesday February 27, 2018 @02:07PM (#56195683)

    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      They don't value communication and collaboration over coding skills. They just don't know for to measure coding ability.

  • Bad bosses only listen when you agree with them [hackernoon.com].

    Collaboration and communication has to go both ways for it to actually work.

  • BULLSHIT (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Austerity Empowers ( 669817 ) on Tuesday February 27, 2018 @02:18PM (#56195767)

    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.

     

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Shotgun ( 30919 )

      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.

      • 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 sl

  • Blame yourself, always (Score:3)

    by M0j0_j0j0 ( 1250800 ) on Tuesday February 27, 2018 @02:22PM (#56195789)

    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.
  • 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.

  • Everyone who worked for enough years know that this is true. I've met plenty of "mad geniuses" who wrote unmaintainable code that they could not explain and also, surprisingly enough, had bugs. Most programming jobs are not rocket science, and if someone is such a genius, he should usually be able to communicate well enough what he is doing.

    English is a programming language just like C or Java, the only difference is that it runs on people instead of computers. There's no excuse why one can't be proficient

  • 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

  • What else is old (Score:5, Interesting)

    by enjar ( 249223 ) on Tuesday February 27, 2018 @03:34PM (#56196337) Homepage

    Back in the 90's when I was getting my engineering degree, people were whimpering about.

    1. Having to write out lab reports
    2. The indignity and waste of time that the non-engineering required classes were
    3. Getting points taken away on lab reports for grammar, spelling mistakes, and punctuation
    4. Having to make presentations to the class, explain data and give demonstrations on engineering subjects.

    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.

  • 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 p

  • 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,"

  • What bosses actually want is... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by cyn1c77 ( 928549 ) on Tuesday February 27, 2018 @04:36PM (#56196755)

    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.

  • Basically, they want us to do their jobs for them? Because if we can, we can set up and run our own businesses.

  • Yeah, whatever (Score:4, Insightful)

    by russotto ( 537200 ) on Tuesday February 27, 2018 @09:32PM (#56198105) Journal

    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.

  • 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 w

  • 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.

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