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.
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!"
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.
> 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(!)
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
- 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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++.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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).
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.
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.)
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.
> [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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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)"
> 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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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+.
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.
"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?!"
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
4 replies →
> 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(!)
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
2 replies →
>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
2 replies →
Looks very robotic to me, never worked on a place where meetings and dealing with other humans wasn't part of the job.
4 replies →
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.
5 replies →
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.
Is this genuinely common? I’ve only ever seen that level of hand holding extended to new grad hires.
6 replies →
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.
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.
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?
2 replies →
Often it means being a sociopath
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Best to also avoid people with LSP and debugger addiction.
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.
1 reply →
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.
> 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.
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?
>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++.
Curious, could you give examples of how you've been able to double your productivity with AI?
2 replies →
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.
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.
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.
1 reply →
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.
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.
In the end, they might convince you that 2+2=5.
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"
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).
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.
2 replies →
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.)
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.
> [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.
you can be better and decide not to do it because you dgaf
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.
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.
The shift is from tarpit to unemployment. A Jira ticket processing dev still has use. Probably not for much longer.
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.
1 reply →
> 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).
Where did I claim one implied the other?
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.
The author works on AI-powered Brand Agents built for marketers & publishers. That should be enough to tell you it’s not worth reading.
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.
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.
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.
false equivalence
It won't help. LLMs are good at soft skills, too. There's a whole "AI girlfriend" industry, and it's quite successful.
LLMs are not good at soft skills, just the girlfriends you can get in this society are even worse.
So pretty similar to product owners or project managers in your average enterprise
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
"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.
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.
The irony here is that universities are struggling to teach writing skills, due to massive cheating with AI.
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.
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.
2 replies →
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+.
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.
"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?!"
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.
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.
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.
On the other hand, the increase in remote roles has made this a bit easier for some.
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?
6 replies →
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?
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.
1 reply →
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.
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.
2 replies →
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.
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.
8 replies →
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.
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.
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.
calculators doing a perfect job did not end accountants' jobs, it made it faster.
Your sort of paying them to understand the tax code that changes year to year tho
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.
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.
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.
The classic "technically strong but lacking soft skills" unheard story about you through the office after your results.
Counter-point, a three person dev team displaces a multi million revenue company.
Why have a slow human CEO when machines are faster..
Watch them
In education, I view them as life skills, durable skills.
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.
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
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.
You never really could. If you hear of a (very) succesful software engineer with horrid soft skills they’re a 1%er chance wise
I’ve been hearing this since the 90’s.
I feel like it's a myth promoted by engineers with poor soft skills to justify themselves never learning said skills.
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 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
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.
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://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.
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.
"Effective communication, building trust, bringing people along with you" That's a David Brent powerpoint presentation.
2 replies →
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.
[dead]
[dead]