Comment by ergothus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ergothus | Hacker News Reader

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> focus on technical ability, that’s a hell of a lot harder to come by than “powerpoint skills”.

I'll agree and disagree:

Yes, the target audience here SHOULD focus on technical ability. Not because it's "harder", but because that will be the primary decider in getting hired.

That said, I'd say my communication skills have been a central part of my success. Not "powerpoint", so much as being able to distill down ideas, translate abstractions, and of late, learning how to examine other people's ideas without coming across as I'm attacking them. My personal impression and the reaction my managers have given me is that these skills are both rare and valued in the field. But you do of course need technical ability or they are worthless.

I definitely think I've achieved more success than my technical ability alone would grant me. It could be Imposter Syndrome talking, but I'm not actually all that great at this. Just good enough, and my communication skills ensure that the "good enough" is applied where it's needed and to the degree it is needed.

Ultimately, coding is communication, and maintainable/extendable/flexible code is a lot of communication to other devs (including your future self). Even outside of the role of managers, and even outside of planning and architecting with your peers, communication is a valuable skill for a programmer to have.

Junior developers get hired on their technical skills. Mid-career developers get hired on their communications, interpersonal, and domain understanding skills. Founders and executives get "hired" on their strategic skills.

If it's your first job out of college, don't worry too much about the communications skills yet. Your technical abilities will be your differentiator, and your daily job will largely consist of implementing things.

But if you don't pick up communication skills within the first 10-15 years of your career, it will limit you. You'll be stuck implementing things forever, which may be what you want, but it will shut you out of some higher-compensated and higher-impact jobs.

Unless you just want to go the founder route and hand your company off to a professional CEO that the VCs hire once you've proven out product/market fit. If you have both technical and strategic skills you can do that, but the lack of communication skills will still keep you from running your own company.

Too young to know for sure...but seems right. Can you help me understand what strategic skills are? Resource management?

Strategic skills are understanding the context and constraints that you operate under and acting to maximize the advantage that things you do not control give you. Things like positioning yourself in the right market within the right industry; understanding how the market will change and how you can capitalize on that change; knowing who the other players are; predicting what they're likely to do based on their incentives; building alliances; making trade-offs; and identifying underutilized resources that you can capitalize on.

>Junior developers get hired on their technical skills. Mid-career developers get hired on their communications, interpersonal, and domain understanding skills.

I found this to be true outside of tech hubs (Silicon Valley, NYC, London, etc.) but in tech hubs mid career developers absolutely do get hired on tech skills.

Even outside of tech hubs, mid career developers might not be hired on their technical skills directly, but they'll definitely get hired for a work history that implies stellar technical skills (e.g. a 2 year stint at Google).

This happens not because tech skills aren't valued outside of hubs, but because there's a dearth of people to actually assess them properly. This is, I think, where the idea that domain knowledge/people skills are more important - from people working in, say, Oklahoma City rather than NYC.

> learning how to examine other people's ideas without coming across as I'm attacking them.

This is an extremely valuable skill to learn as well as a difficult one. Unless you work in a vacuum this will help you work better as a team. It is one of the differences between a fantastic manager and a bad manager. People will value your opinion and it will help you learn more (because you will see more code and how others do things. Unless you're the best and do everything perfectly). It's also something you have to continually work at and improve upon. Of soft skills this is one I'd put in the forefront for any engineer.

The real pain is that most of us think we ARE good at it. We think about our intentions, and not what comes across. Intent rather than impact.

But it's the impact that matters.

This is very true. But once you start learning this I think people start to realize others intent and that changes impact. At the end of the day we all kinda suck at communicating with one another and I believe that you should try to see intent too(I've found that this makes my life substantially less stressful as things that used to impact me negatively don't do so as much anymore). I'm not trying to give people an excuse for being a jerk but it helps with impact if you realize that they're not trying to be or that they're just stressed (I've also found that by doing this and being calm generally results in people apologizing after they've destressed).

i think this is called empathy

Haha yes. But some times it needs to be restated.

It is. But these days, when the word "empathy" shows up in discussions, it's usually in the context of understanding someone's difficult position and why they may feel some resentment or jealousy towards you. Here, it's the opposite - it's the empathy needed to not randomly take offense when people say things to you.

One thing that is hard is that you cannon control the impact of your words. You can influence it. With skill and perceptiveness you can strongly influence it. But you cannot 100% prevent someone from interpreting your words as an attack any more than the driver of a car can 100% guarantee he’ll never fatally collide with anyone.

Good resources for understanding how to control the impact of your words include the book Difficult Conversations and others from the Harvard Negotiation Project.

Agreed. A barometer of how well you're doing can be: how effective are you at persuading people when you need to? If you get in the "everyone around me is an idiot / don't know how computers work" head space you're probably lacking on communication skills. Being right is only half the battle - you often have to be able to convince others you are right.

The distinction between this and forms of communication often considered distasteful in technical circles is that you are - in fact - right (technical skill). It's not "sleazy" marketing if it really is "the world's best pizza!" :-)

There is a good saying on this topic that helped me be more mindful of the phenomena you described: people tend to judge themselves by their intentions, but other people by their actions.

An unspecified skill is the ability to distill what the business actually needs versus what they say they need.

Fully agreed. Technical ability comes first, but having good communication skills is a hell of a force multiplier.

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