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Comment by tayo42 | Hacker News Reader

Its an important skill for corporate engineers that want to ladder climb. I think this over focus lately on communication in engineering is making work suck more. This is how politic players dominate and technical work doesn't matter as much as how you sell impact, real or not. We're all stuck playing their game. Engineers get stuck with poorly made decisions made by peoples who feelings cant get hurt, the things we build start to suck. Like a code review you have to hold back on because you can't leave to many comments tearing it apart without coming off like a dick.

Only sub par engineers need to constantly be politely told they suck and have to sugar coat everything for them. Good engineers come up with good ideas, at least good at a foundational level, where you can discuss the pros and cons. If an idea has some legitimate merit but a drawback you don't think is worth it, then the criticisms are real and honest, no ones feelings are getting hurt.

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This is a pretty idealistic and unrealistic take on human behavior. I realize a lot of software types like to pooh-pooh soft skills and think that the ideal is that people can always be Perfect Rational Beings. But this is not how actual humans operate, not even software people.

It's one thing to use a software career to explore the things that give you joy. Building software is fun. But it's another thing to use it to run away from things you're intimidated by, like interacting with other people or empathizing with them. "I got into software so I wouldn't have to deal with people" is a joke, but it's not really a realistic way of approaching the world beyond the very junior level.

You can either rant about how people should be or meet them as they actually are.

While the parent comment may be a little extreme, I would still agree soft skills have been taken too far to the point of neglecting real engineering. Yeah of course don't be a dick to those around you. But there's one thing to be pleasant to coworkers and another thing to make the whole business about socially engineering each other to "rise up the ladder". The latter is, in my opinion, fake as fuck and quite toxic.

You can have pretty normal temperament and be a decent engineer, but if you aren't positive 110% of the time, always sucking up to management, always accepting more work, always subtly gaming those around you, then apparently you're a "bad engineer" for not understanding the "business". I might be crazy but that shit is not normal. Go play the game if you want to but it is not normal.

> I think this over focus lately on communication in engineering is making work suck more. This is how politic players dominate and technical work doesn't matter as much as how you sell impact, real or not.

Yes, tech companies have become more about ladders, optics, proxy metrics, performance review than about building, experimenting, leading with technical skill.

This happens because tech got infected with corpo MBA-style practices. Obviously, not a thriving environment for innovators. Great environment for corporate leeches who themselves can't do anything but want to tell "others" what they should be doing.

And people wonder why I believe software dev has fallen off a cliff.

This is why; and AI, which I see more as a side effect.

I hate to break it to you, but you get to write software because you work for a company that needs to generate revenue in order to pay your salary, pay the bills, and give a dividend to its shareholders. That is why "corpo MBA" people exist.

Inconveniently for some software types, the world doesn't and shouldn't revolve around software development.

Hopefully we can just get away from "MBA types" vs. "software types" altogether.

You should be well rounded. Managers with MBAs who work for tech companies should be able to have technical conversations, and be able to share their opinions with technical people without sounding like imbeciles. Software engineers should be able to understand and discuss business considerations without sounding like it is beneath them, or similarly sounding like they think the money just appears in the bank account magically.

The healthiest organizations promote this multidisciplinary approach, they invest in their employees to help make it happen, and most importantly and perhaps most controversially, if you're not well rounded and knowledgable about all aspects of the business it is extremely career-limiting beyond the lowest levels of management or whatever the terminal IC role is in the org.

> Hopefully we can just get away from "MBA types" vs. "software types" altogether.

Sounds great. Except.. if you're advocating for "charisma" in the first place, then that's probably not really the goal and definitely not the effect that you'll see. Hence the various cranky/skeptical/cynical comments in this thread. There's plenty of charisma in tech already, and it's usually associated with fraudsters like SBF.

If SBF is what you think of when you think of charisma, you've never actually met a charismatic person.

All of this right here . . . ^^

> I hate to break it to you, but you get to write software because you work for a company that needs to generate revenue in order to pay your salary, pay the bills, and give a dividend to its shareholders. That is why "corpo MBA" people exist.

No one's blaming MBA. In fact, if the corpo MBA people actually focused on - generate revenue in order to pay your salary, pay the bills, and give a dividend to its shareholders - that'd be great. Use some skill to generate these.

But corpo MBAs spend an enormous amount of time in ladder-climbing, promos, hirings, firings, reorgs - all of which are orthogonal to the points you described earlier: generate revenue in order to pay your salary, pay the bills, and give a dividend to its shareholders.

TL;DR corpo MBA are not doing what is required of them. Instead, they are sucking on innovators with corpo policies - leading to the original post.

I hate to break it to you, but unless you design a business exactly exquisitely perfect the first time AND trap its employees in amber so they never want to leave, get promoted, or age and retire, then a large part of running it properly is "promos, hirings, firings, and reorgs."

Making the machine run better and more efficiently is how they generate revenue in order to pay your salary, pay the bills, and give a dividend to the shareholders. It's the test automation of the business world.

> I hate to break it to you, but unless you design a business exactly exquisitely perfect the first time AND trap its employees in amber so they never want to leave, get promoted, or age and retire, then a large part of running it properly is "promos, hirings, firings, and reorgs."

This is exactly corpo MBA-style which is orthogonal to innovation. By stating this statement, you just contradicted your own point earlier about why corpo MBAs are needed.

I hate to break it to you - you ARE the typical corpo MBA who will shift goalposts to justify your own position - and it is very evident to anyone engaging in a discussion with you.

It's also a great environment for skilled technical people who don't mind speaking to another human being in person every now and then.

The idea that you are either an MBA-type "politic player" with zero technical skills whatsoever, or someone doing the "real work" who is super technical but starts fopsweating at the idea of having to present their work or write something that isn't code doesn't really line up with my experience.

A sizable percentage of my managers have written code while being managers. A sizable percentage of my programming coworkers have had MBAs.

The two extremes do not last very long in any healthy organization.

I wish the author hadn't used the word Charisma in the title. He doesn't actually describe or define charisma in the text. I suppose this is a primary element of a successful (click attracting) blog post: to provoke discussion by what you leave out.

My takeaway is to ignore the title and per the text, be able to work with other engineers (play well with others). That means speaking their language and being able to relate to others, both with technical precision as warranted, and with human/emotive understanding. To remember that it's not about you, it's about the team/org. To keep in mind principles such as "assume good intent". etc.

Now, it does so happen that most orgs are dysfunctional so being successful at that more "human" / relatability part does mean being successfully dysfunctional. Sadly. Author does live in his utopian world and the blog is titled as such.

Working with other engineers is the easy part. Managing up and working with the “business” is a lot harder.

i dunno. i've worked with plenty of jerks over my career. some of them brilliant. at times i probably qualify as jerky. less often as i mellow.

If we assume that both the typical engineer and non technical person is not a jerk, it’s still easier to talk to an engineer because you both speak the same language and usually have the same concept of the world.

It’s harder for many engineers to be outcome focus (what non engineers care about “business value”) and work backwards without getting into the weeds. Engineers usually think in terms of process.

Engineers are also more pessimistic thinking about all of the things that can go wrong and non engineers are usually more optimistic seeing everything that is possible. I’m not passing judgment on either.

The “Geek Leader’s Handbook” (https://www.slideshare.net/CommunicationCoach/the-geeks-guid...) and my pass Amazon indoctrination of “Working Backwards” helped me a lot.

You didn't really address the value of charisma. You just vented against ladder climbing corporate engineers and insinuated you are mean in code reviews.

Charisma isn't lying or being sensitive, so you aren't opposed to it.

There's a whole section in this article called "Motivation" which tries to highlight the importance of soft skills in general for engineers. It doesn't begin with just charisma. Charsmia is just one part of the soft skills overview this series is going over it looks like

Charisma is not about honesty or empathy either. Trump is very charismatic. So is Andrew Tate.

I agree with this. The author is just documenting how to "play the game", not how to be a good engineer.

Which is still valuable to some extent.

It's all related. Your effectiveness depends to some extent on the people who work with you (both up and down the org chart) and the problems you work on. Unless you work solo, charisma matters as much and maybe even more than other hard skills.

The ability to play the game is part of being a good engineer. That doesn't mean you have to out-do the sales team for outgoingness or anything like that, but you do have to be able to persuade people of the rightness of your ideas. That's will never be a purely technical skill.

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