https://shift.newco.co/hard-and-soft-skills-in-tech-8be00216f67f

I’ve recently seen a lot of very anxious responses from people in tech at anything which suggests that their “core skills” may be devalued, especially in favor of other skills which they haven’t spent their lives on. Most importantly, this shows up in the argument over “hard” versus “soft” skills. That anxiety is itself a signal of how important this has become. But there’s a hidden assumption we’ve been making that (I suspect) has increased the anxiety far out of proportion: and maybe perversely, it comes from not taking soft skills seriously enough. Today, I’d like to share some thoughts on what’s actually happening, and a set of things we can do to help fix it for all of us.

One of the most reliable ways I can see anxious responses on the Internet is to suggest that soft skills may eclipse hard skills in importance for engineers. By “anxious responses,” I don’t mean “disagreement:” I specifically mean emotionally charged disagreement. And that emotional charge is a very important data point.