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+.
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.
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:
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.
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?
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!"
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.
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?
>>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 were some kind of supernatural coders who were doing the work of 20 people or were literally the only people who could understand the maths or 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.
> 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.
This is factually wrong. Until a few decades ago in tech, and it's still like that in most economic sectors and I dare say most countries, it's the managers that take the role of figuring out the organization and interfacing with other teams. An engineer being only in charge of technical issues but nothing business-related was the norm; that would yield no promotion into management, of course, but still the norm.
I neglected soft skills and I survived so far. I'm bad at soft skills and I probably have some sort of mental disorder like autism or something. I don't really care, I don't enjoy interacting with people and I prefer interacting with machines as much as possible. I've found a place that pays me for my technical skills and does not bother me with human interactions, I think there are more places like that in the world.
McDonalds and Taco Bell tried to get rid of their "soft skills" (AKA customer service} and look how they're doing right now... Endless stores that all look & feel the same -- uncomfortable seats, no happy families around for longer than 10 minutes, longer drive-thru lines, and impersonal & impatient staff that avoids customers like the plague.
Evangelists will preach Ai because it's good for corporations that don't care about customer needs, but in the same sense, it may well be the catalyst for many to move out of cities to more human areas as it grows.
Businesses dictate the spread of Ai, and then foist it on customers because they think monopolies are sustainable, but the foundational rules always ring true -- Customer service & commitment are essential to the survival of a business. This tone deaf approach will eventually alienate many from companies that adopt it, and there aren't enough tech-inclined introverts to sustain profit in a world where Ai takes everyone's jobs. We don't ALWAYS want to talk to vending machines, human interaction is a need for many that Ai evangelists seem to think will simply go away.
I hope there are still some reasonable minded business leaders out there to swoop in and fix things after the ashes this era leaves along with all the VC carnage & political damage rendered on our economy.
Ai is great for math though... Maybe that should be the less-destructive focus.
>McDonalds and Taco Bell tried to get rid of their "soft skills" (AKA customer service} and look how they're doing right now... Endless stores that all look & feel the same -- uncomfortable seats, no happy families around for longer than 10 minutes, longer drive-thru lines, and impersonal & impatient staff that avoids customers like the plague.
How's their profitability? Long drive-thru lines sounds like business is doing well.
This reminds me of people complaining about Windows, with its ads and AI and tracking and such. They don't like it as users, but the company is making plenty of money, so of course it's the right thing to do.
Overall, it'll be a worse world if you can't make a living purely on hard skills.
If soft skills is mostly about sucking up, and there is no demand for any hard skill, you'll find society less able to stand up to the pressures of a majority group, because guess what, they're all too scared to stand up as an individual for fear of dropping the ball on the soft skill.
Moreover, the game theory of the soft skill is treacherous and uncertain. There's too many unknown unknowns, it's like not knowing if the dice you're playing is loaded against you. You don't know how many cultural land mines you might step on when interacting with your superior, or if there's a glass ceiling enforced by a group who will nitpick on minor irrelevant 'faults'.
Whereas compare soft skills to hard skills, you have a major advantage in certainty. There is a dice loaded in your favor. You know you can get much of the stuff done, and once you've reached the desired results, that's all there is to it.
I also could go on on how soft skills erodes human's capacity for judging what is value, instead basing their opinions on the majority source of opinions... It'll definitely be a much more irrational world to live in.
Also the vast majority of sw engineers just have average soft skills. There is still a difference to sales and we certainly do not need any more pretentious behaviour in technical discussions. Yes, VCs will require you to advertise yourself, but I think many also just want a realistic approach about a potential business ventures.
The most practical problem sw engineers have here that they waste hours on some frivolous technical solution that could have been cleared up with a pragmatic approach through a three minute call.
That engineers aren't people persons is a stereotype. There are as many "autists" in the social sciences. Yes, I know I shouldn't use that word for anything that is not a pathological diagnosis.
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.
> 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).
> [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.
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.
To add - their comment about socially prickly smart devs (my paraphrase) makes me think they are referencing the mad genius stereotype (crazy artist, Aspie developer, etcetera).
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 implémentation details, quickly solved.
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"
This is actually a soft skill deficiency of not being able to appreciate importance of other people's fields of expertise. Not unlike a hard skill expert's failure to appreciate the importance of soft skills.
People with truly good soft skills are a pleasure to work with even if your soft skills are not that great.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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)"
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Can you share examples? I've never seen something like that.
Going above and beyond is hardly ever rewarded in my experience, except when it happens in the stupidest way, like producing more technical debt faster.
83 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 90.2 ms ] threadIf 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+.
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.
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?
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!"
They honestly have no idea what "software engineering" in a professional context even looks like. So they come up with this prattle.
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.
I've worked with plenty of programmers who were absolutely insufferable human beings but were some kind of supernatural coders who were doing the work of 20 people or were literally the only people who could understand the maths or 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.
This is factually wrong. Until a few decades ago in tech, and it's still like that in most economic sectors and I dare say most countries, it's the managers that take the role of figuring out the organization and interfacing with other teams. An engineer being only in charge of technical issues but nothing business-related was the norm; that would yield no promotion into management, of course, but still the norm.
Evangelists will preach Ai because it's good for corporations that don't care about customer needs, but in the same sense, it may well be the catalyst for many to move out of cities to more human areas as it grows.
Businesses dictate the spread of Ai, and then foist it on customers because they think monopolies are sustainable, but the foundational rules always ring true -- Customer service & commitment are essential to the survival of a business. This tone deaf approach will eventually alienate many from companies that adopt it, and there aren't enough tech-inclined introverts to sustain profit in a world where Ai takes everyone's jobs. We don't ALWAYS want to talk to vending machines, human interaction is a need for many that Ai evangelists seem to think will simply go away.
I hope there are still some reasonable minded business leaders out there to swoop in and fix things after the ashes this era leaves along with all the VC carnage & political damage rendered on our economy.
Ai is great for math though... Maybe that should be the less-destructive focus.
How's their profitability? Long drive-thru lines sounds like business is doing well.
This reminds me of people complaining about Windows, with its ads and AI and tracking and such. They don't like it as users, but the company is making plenty of money, so of course it's the right thing to do.
If soft skills is mostly about sucking up, and there is no demand for any hard skill, you'll find society less able to stand up to the pressures of a majority group, because guess what, they're all too scared to stand up as an individual for fear of dropping the ball on the soft skill.
Moreover, the game theory of the soft skill is treacherous and uncertain. There's too many unknown unknowns, it's like not knowing if the dice you're playing is loaded against you. You don't know how many cultural land mines you might step on when interacting with your superior, or if there's a glass ceiling enforced by a group who will nitpick on minor irrelevant 'faults'.
Whereas compare soft skills to hard skills, you have a major advantage in certainty. There is a dice loaded in your favor. You know you can get much of the stuff done, and once you've reached the desired results, that's all there is to it.
I also could go on on how soft skills erodes human's capacity for judging what is value, instead basing their opinions on the majority source of opinions... It'll definitely be a much more irrational world to live in.
The most practical problem sw engineers have here that they waste hours on some frivolous technical solution that could have been cleared up with a pragmatic approach through a three minute call.
That engineers aren't people persons is a stereotype. There are as many "autists" in the social sciences. Yes, I know I shouldn't use that word for anything that is not a pathological diagnosis.
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.
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).
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.
Are rudeness and crazyness markers of intelligence? is Terry Davis a good or bad example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16105215
In the end, they might convince you that 2+2=5.
The Expert https://youtu.be/BKorP55Aqvg?si=n3apbzYNDb4U0hmD
People with truly good soft skills are a pleasure to work with even if your soft skills are not that great.
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.
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.
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
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.
Why have a slow human CEO when machines are faster..
Heck, I even know a guy who refuses to use an IDE with Java and the indenting is a mess, but he gets there.
Some of them don’t even do trivial stuff very well.
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.
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.
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.
That is one reason why companies don't like seniors, we know their tricks.
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.
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.
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.
Can you share examples? I've never seen something like that.