Comment by cgiles | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cgiles | Hacker News Reader

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> I learned how to be a good multiplier: how to help people out, help them grow, unblock procedural bottlenecks in a lasting way...

So, here you perfectly describe a 10x middle manager. Or just a "good" middle manager, because I agree this 10x business is kind of silly.

I will never understand why people take all these soft skills unrelated to programming and say they are more important to a programmer than skill at programming. It's not that these skills are undesirable. It's just that, to continue the sports analogies, it is like saying that it is more important for a basketball player to be fast and be a good team player rather than be skilled at shooting and blocking.

If anything it is the other way around, people with good soft skills and bad technical skills are an absolute menace and plague if they try to get involved in anything technical. They have no idea how much they screw up everything they touch.

If you aren't a programmer, and you're a manager of programmers, then fine. A coach needs a totally different skillset than a player and you can be a fine coach even if you are a mediocre player.

EDIT: Have you worked in the industry as an engineer? The following is drawn upon my combined experience as an engineer and as a leader.

Who said I was a manager as I was developing and applying these skills? I was doing this as I was still top of the pack as an engineer. I will never understand why people take all these soft skills that are completely required to do the job of engineering and say they are not part of the job of engineering. What is it with the sports analogies? They're fundamentally inappropriate and imply a deeply reductive conception of the craft of software engineering. You're doing something with a goal far more complicated than "the team with the most points wins".

Moreover, you're drawing a false dichotomy. People with the technical skills to really be highly productive engineers always have the soft skills too. They are both required to sustain high productivity.

But please, don't tell me I'm not a programmer. I'm an excellent engineer, and I've always been near or at the top as an IC. But, that's not in spite of my soft skills. It's because the two create a feedback loop that helped me level up and run things more effectively than engineers that overspecialized on one or the other. And again, the best ones I've worked with have been the same.

If you've seen such engineers, then that's one thing. But if you haven't, implying that you even need to choose, or that the best engineers don't have both -- it's specious. It's something you think must be the case because you don't have a more exhaustive set of data and experiences to draw from. And that's okay! But then, one would hope you'd at least be curious about it rather than dismissing it.

These engineers are not unicorns or mythical creatures. They're competent professionals that take every part of their job seriously. They're the kind I prefer to work alongside and hire.

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