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drdaemanHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

But I'm not sure those things require "soft skills" aka - in my understanding - being a people …

… But I'm not sure those things require "soft skills" aka - in my understanding - being a people person. For me, it was a very simple learning process - I (as a junior) coded something, a manager came next month and said I have to rewrite everything again because things have changed. I hated it, so I started to think how to possibly avoid or minimize it and optimize my own processes. And in my mental model, it's not about people (save for tiny companies where a whole department/role is a single person, so I have to account for their mental chaos monkeys), it's all about business. That's why I wrote "stakeholders", intentionally dehumanizing (with no negative connotations) the model.

Original discussionAI killed the tech interview. Now what?631 source comments · at import
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scarface_74HN

Dealing with people and communication can be learned. I get it. By nature I was very much an introvert except for certain scenarios when I was in my comfort zone until at least my mid 30s. I was an only child, the stereotypical short, fat kid with a computer growing up in the 80s (still short, became a gym rat, part time fitness instructor and only stopped the latter as my other obligations became greater). Horrible dating life and a bad first marriage before turning 35 (happily remarried since then). It became apparent that to get ahead in my career, “codez real gud” was going to limit my career. I slowly learned how to “act like I like people”. But you can only add so much value to an organization typing on a keyboard. There is a reason that every single tech company promotes based on “impact”, “scope”, “dealing with ambiguity”. Those all require soft skills.

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ghaffHN

Thinking about engineering leads I know who aren't about leading huge teams, it's still about mentoring, talking to people, making connections, often talking to external audiences, etc. I think a lot of that is "soft skills." Maybe not becoming a stereotypical sales person. But it's also not don't ever bug me and let me code.

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scarface_74HN

The way that most tech companies define levels - yes I’m simplifying slightly. I’ll provide citations: Junior - you are told what to do (business objective) and how to do it (technical). Mid - you are told what to do (business objective). But you are expected to use your experience to figure out the “how”. You should be able to lead a decently complicated feature/epic/work stream either by yourself or with others and mentoring other juniors. Senior - You are expected to lead major projects that involve multiple epics with multiple developers, talk to “the business”, disambiguate, deal with XYProblems, communicate trade offs between time, cost, meeting requirements, etc. Now you also start having to deal with cross team coordination. Staff - cross team impact, dealing much more with business strategy and setting technical direction. As an IC, the only things you have at your disposal are …

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