Tech Workers: Hard vs Soft Skills (Part 2/2)

We've looked at hard skills, now let's explore soft skills!

Soft Skills

Contrary to popular belief, soft skills are not just about getting along wth other people, or getting them to think highly of you. It is about communication. It's not about proficiency in any given language and knowing fancy long words - there are plenty of people without a formal education who communicate a lot better than people who speak the Queen's English. Conversely, I've known people who are great at English, but come off so insufferable that nobody wants to deal with them. Being able to speak a language well does not automatically make one persuasive. Thus, proficiency in a language is more of a hard skill than a soft one.

It's all  about
communication.

Whether it's giving someone their flowers, managing expectations or diffusing potential (or existing!) tensions, discount soft skills at your peril. Just as a skilled programmer knows when to code and when not to code, someone well-versed in soft skills knows when to talk and when not to talk.

Soft skills are the skills that deal with communication with human beings. Human-computer interaction or just human-to-human communication? It is all relevant. Software is used by human beings, and developed by human beings. Therefore, any communication involving human beings remains a valuable skill.

What happens when you neglect soft skills?

Remember that the number one goal of software development is to solve problems and add value. In the case of your organization, it probably means to solve business problems and add business value.

Even without going into the area of personnel management, soft skills are very relevant in the software product itself. When developers concentrate on using technical skills and exclude soft skills, there's a danger that they will wind up with solutions that simply don't improve the product for the end-user. And this is important, why? Because ultimately, products are created for users. And that involves having enough empathy to understand what the end-user needs as opposed to what is technically superior.

The problem with management skills is that they're often not seen as a skill in their own right. People, for some strange reason, seem to think that programmers become better managers just because they've been writing code longer. News flash - practice in a skill improves that particular skill. Thus, practicing writing code only makes a developer better at writing code. Spending time developing software makes a dev better at developing software. Not at managing people.

Collaborative effort.

Sure, a more experienced software developer would be better at handling the software development process. Identifying potential pitfalls. Troubleshooting. But that same developer would not necessarily be good at delegation of work, managing personality clashes in a team, accounting to higher management for schedule shortfalls, and the like. These are a different set of skills, no matter how much people want to pretend otherwise.

Therefore, if you're promoted only for your technical ability, you'll get found out as soon as they start giving you subordinates. That's where any weaknesses you have at the actual art of man-management, will be exposed.

Where I stand with Soft Skills

As mentioned earlier, proficiency with the English language (or any language) does not automatically make one a good communicator. I happen to be living proof of that. There's been times I tried to describe a problem in a Service Request and fell far short of making myself understood. There have been also times I tried to describe a solution, with similar results.

Sometimes I forget that the people I speak to aren't technically trained, and that I have to be explicit when explaining certain things. Sometimes even with technically-trained personnel, it's good to spell things out just to be safe. There are times something sounds good in my head, only to sound comically wrong after I put it in writing.

Comes out wrong in writing.

That's one of the reasons I blog. Even if I never reach a wide audience, the point is the exercise in communication. Explaining technical concepts. Use of analogies. Appropriately describing my feelings and positions, both positive and negative, about certain subjects.

All said, I could always improve. All of us could. It's a skillset so wide that it covers all industries, not just software, at all levels.

In conclusion...

Hard skills are the skills that deal with computers.

Soft skills are the skills that deal with people.

In today's world, it's extremely hard to survive in the tech industry without a certain modicum of either one. There are, of course, extreme examples of each, but they are outliers.

For good or for skill,
T___T