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Karel Čapek wrote: developers who will never be able to lead and will always make poor managers
Yup, that's me, I keep telling them I cannot do a managers job, it took an offer to quit before they understood!
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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Leng Vang wrote: Management can't carry out the hard technical tasks that IT skills people can
Bit of an overgeneralisation that. I can think of at least a dozen managers who I know who have excellent technical skills, and are good at management.
Leng Vang wrote: Companies should stop looking for people with both skills because they are only going to get half-good skills people
Complete and utter horse doo-doo. If they can find them, then great. I'd hate to have such a narrow minded bigoted view of the IT profession.
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Pete O'Hanlon wrote: Complete and utter horse doo-doo
That's not something someone with good soft skills would say! 
I agree with you whole-heartedly though.
My blog[ ^]
public class SanderRossel : Lazy<Person>
{
public void DoWork()
{
throw new NotSupportedException();
}
}
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Actually that does show soft skills. You should see what I would have said if I didn't have them. 
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Does it involve more excrements?
My blog[ ^]
public class SanderRossel : Lazy<Person>
{
public void DoWork()
{
throw new NotSupportedException();
}
}
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Much more. Elephant loads.
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Leng Vang wrote: Companies should stop looking for people with both skills because they are only going to get half-good skills people.
I would rather work with a person with great soft-skills and mediocre hard-skills than the other way around. I've worked with people with sh*tty communication, team, and conflict resolution skills, and it sucks -- it's aggravating, time wasting, and, in my opinion, is the primary reason I've ended up rewriting someone else's code, because they wouldn't listen and/or follow instructions. A person with good soft-skills is a lot more capable of learning and taking on new challenges. As Pete said, if you can find both in one person, that's great, but like I said, I want a good communicator first.
Marc
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Marc Clifton wrote: A person with good soft-skills is a lot more capable of learning and taking on new challenges.
I agreed with you up to that point, but that is eminently untrue.
The ability to play nice with the other kids has nothing to do with one's intelligence or eagerness to learn.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Agreed! 
Your time will come, if you let it be right.
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Mark_Wallace wrote: The ability to play nice with the other kids has nothing to do with one's intelligence or eagerness to learn.
Good point, though, using communication skills in a manipulative way (which is what I call "playing nice") isn't really what I meant. I guess the concept of what a good communicator is needs to be better defined.
Marc
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Marc Clifton wrote: I would rather work with a person with great soft-skills and mediocre hard-skills than the other way around
And me the other way round. As a manager, I buy technical competence. I have no willing to get some nice guy who cannot code in my team. I have currently people who are very rough in their commnunication, but they get things done, and this is what I want from them, not being communicative and nice to each-other.
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Rage wrote: I have no willing to get some nice guy who cannot code in my team.
You've just nailed the difference between German and British industries - we could do with a bit more thinking like that in the UK 
How do you know so much about swallows? Well, you have to know these things when you're a king, you know.
modified 31-Aug-21 21:01pm.
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Rage wrote: I have no willing to get some nice guy who cannot code in my team.
Of course, but isn't the team more efficient if it also is capable of communicating well? On the other hand, if all you need is the equivalent of a skilled laborer, then yes, I can see that communication is not really a requirement.
Marc
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Soft skills are a pro in any profession! Some people have them, others don't. I guess they can be trained...
I know how important they are because I didn't have them. I had some nice ideas about my companies' products and code. To bad I told my managers in a way that they didn't WANT to listen to me (basically what I told them is that everything they had was bad and I had the solution to all the problems they didn't have). Later I learned to word it a bit different, more along the lines of "what we have now has some great potential, but what if we changed this a bit and did that too?" I found that management was willing to listen and management found that I did actually have some good ideas, but that my communication skills were a bit lacking. And once I got me some soft skills I got me some promotions because now I had good ideas AND I could communicate them to management and the team 
Leng Vang wrote: Companies should stop looking for people with both skills because they are only going to get half-good skills people.
I completely disagree with you on that one. I know some people who have great technical knowledge and soft skills! And I know these people are hard to come by so they're worth something!
My blog[ ^]
public class SanderRossel : Lazy<Person>
{
public void DoWork()
{
throw new NotSupportedException();
}
}
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How About NO SKILLS?
Haha, I worked with a guy who was a jerk (no softskills) _and_ had no hard skills. His code was utter trash and then he'd defend it. Then he'd go to managment behind people's backs and undermine them.
Okay, how bad was his code? He didn't even know how to use a function. Not kidding. He had a bug in a for loop once and it was repeated over 13,000 lines of code about 50 times. Same for loop.
Everyone wanted to fire him but no one ever did.
They just kept passing him along to other divisions within the large corp.
Ineptness Has Its Place.
He was successful, if you consider that he got paid by a company for many years.
I hope this made you laugh, because it was painful at the time.
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I disagree  ... that guy definitely had some soft skills to manage to keep his job!
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Quote: Soft skills are management and leadership trades
I completely disagree. Soft skills are part and parcel of any job - useful for getting information out of people (definitely IT related), useful for influencing how you want to do things (definitely IT related), useful for finding out new things (definitely IT related) etc etc etc. We are all managers (of ourselves). We are all leaders, no matter how "insignificant" our role.
To be honest, in my personal experience, "management" and "leadership" in many places would benefit from learning the true power of "soft" skills and how they could benefit their teams. I once worked with someone who was technically inept ... but they kept "the world" off our backs with enough technical jargon while letting us get on with our jobs (and authorising the training budget  ) ... in other words, they took one for the team. He also kept up enough with changing technology terms to make it convincing.
I guess it all comes down to the definition of an "IT Career" - I've lost count of the times a user has asked me to fix their broken home PC/Laptop or "how do I change my screen resolution" or some such. Doing that stuff is not my "IT Career" but it is for other people - and when I call a helpline (yet another "IT Career") I appreciate the people who have the "soft skills" - not sure what they do to keep "current" at it though.
Have a nice day!
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Soft skills translates to backstabbing, bullshitting, ass-kissing, etc.
I have encountered several people with such soft skills in my career.
Unfortunately, top management likes these things because they themselves reached the top thru such techniques.
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This is all too true all too many times.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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People that have change the world the most is often complete maniacs (Cesar, Napoleon, Alexander ... and on and on ). They are very good at inspiring people getting them to work for them, whatever they crazy idea they had, but running a county in peace that would benefit the common man they have no clue about. In short: I agree
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Well you know what they say:
An organization is like a tree full of monkeys.
The monkeys on the top look down and see a tree full of smiling faces.
The monkeys on the bottom look up and see nothing but a bunch of assholes.
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So... hierarchy is ... wrong? 
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Didn't say that, it's a necessary evil until someone comes up with a better solution.
Just stated that people on the top branches and the bottom branches may have slightly different opinions on how soft skills are working out.
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Yeah, yeah, perspective and sh*t
Although if I where to complain about hierarchical structures, it might seem a bit strange as we live in Scandinavia. We generally score low on hierarchical things compare to Japan and pretty much every other country in the world.
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Succinct.
A small story here, told by my colleague:
A manager asked his junior: "<<some technical="" problem,="" and="" one="" proposed="" solution="">>. Will this work?". The junior said: "Well, blah blah blah ... <<add all="" indecisive="" statements="" you="" know="">>".
The manager replied: "This is a yes and no kind of answer. Tell me definitely".
IMHO, what is needed is:
"Yes, this solution works. However we need to fill in these gaps ..."; or
"No, this solution will not work. Does not fulfill these two most important conditions ...".
Further IMHO, this is the most important soft skill needed. All others follow.
modified 4-Feb-15 3:58am.
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