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Is Critical Thinking the Most Important Skill for Software Engineers?
(blog.pragmaticengineer.com)
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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Wow, this blog post does not know itself. It goes into some details, but completely misses the glaringly obvious fact that this is not "critical thinking" issue but one of Professional Communications. Our technology industries are overrun with weak communicators. We all receive gargantuan tech educations, either formally or self taught, but no where in these common and ever present tech education efforts is there any Professional Communications training. This is why the blog author feels afraid to speak up, and is also why his coworkers just nodded along - they have zero training how to speak up! They don't know how, feel inferior because they don't know how, and basically get talked into situations they cannot defend against because they can't explain themselves, cannot explain why some aspect they sense is not correct without emotional baggage and a sense of "insulting the information source".
We need to recognize our profession needs quality professional communications training across the board in order to prevent the nonsense situations and loss of quality forward progress as described by this blog post.
This rings so true to me!
It’s a shame to see clever people get lost in the minutiae. There are good managers out there who can spot these problems and help out. But they're few and far between. So without good management nor the ability to communicate for themselves you get eye-watering levels of wasted effort.