Soft skills vs Tech skills
The morning standup at Smurf Systems Inc. was a masterclass in empathy. “I love how you held space for my feelings when I deleted the entire database,” Brainy Smurf said tearfully. The team snapped their fingers in support: clapping was too aggressive. Meanwhile, their client’s website had displayed “Error 404: Smurf Not Found” for three weeks, but nobody wanted to ruin the psychological safety by mentioning it.
Then Gargamel walked in, fixed everything in an hour, and got reported to HR for “creating a toxic environment with his competence.”
I don’t understand: why do we compare these two skills? Why only two large sets of skills? Naive!
Sure, skills are important. Skills are also teachable. However, skills are often orthogonal. The above statement is, therefore, incorrect. It is like asking: do you prefer more of the X or the Y axis in a coordinate system? (Yeah, we all know the X axis is more important than the Y axis, right?)
We, as software engineers, should avoid flosculae. Thinking out loud here; we should even fight against them. They are often a form of cognitive compression and without context, shouting them out is simply worthless.
Don’t be a Smurf.