I always hated this side of “communication, teamwork, and personality” early in my career. I thought those soft skills were overvalued by people who weren’t good in their technical skill.

Now that I’ve been a senior engineer for a while, I can say the soft skills are just as important as the technical skills. It sucks leading people with bad attitude and those whom we have to babysit all the time.

[–] shalafi@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Lemmy is eat up with kids who downplay soft skills, sometimes acting like those skills are not only unnecessary, but undesirable. Happy to see so many in this conversation talking about their importance!

And us IT nerds are the worst, or were historically. Used to be, you could be antisocial and literally stinky, but hey, we had the arcane knowledge employers had to have. They were forced deal with us weirdo wizards, what with our long hair, holey jeans and beat up Chuck Taylors. Not so any longer. (I'd argue we've made huge strides towards a middle ground!)

Reminds me of the return-to-office hate around here. A mandatory, 5-day RTO is a revolting policy that only loses the best employees, plain dumb. But around here we act like there is no benefit to in-person collaboration. It's obvious to me and I have a dozen examples at hand. Plus, you gonna tell me a group of social animals gains nothing from being social?! Jesus that's naive.

[–] thejoker954@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago

You know you can be social outside of work, right?

Just because we are 'social' animals doesn't mean we spend every moment picking lice out of each others hair.