artisanal geek

a pox on “soft skills”

So, I was speaking with an intern developer the other day, and he was asking for my thoughts on how people just starting out in the industry can keep themselves adaptable and stand out in the storm of “AI” related topics in tech these days. Being asked for career advice is always an interesting thing for me, simply because most of my career has come down to patience, hard work and luck. These days when everything is seemingly about your hustle, my career process seems remarkably prosaic, making it difficult to describe in a way that sounds even vaguely useful. (At least, that’s how things seem coming from the perspective of someone who has struggled with imposter syndrome their entire career, and has multi-sensory aphantasia, making memories behave quite differently.)

There are terms that I loathe in IT, for various reasons. If I never hear “let’s double-click on that” in a meeting again (to drill into a topic further), I’ll be inordinately pleased, for instance. Other terms, such as “prepone”, I’ve reluctantly learned to accept as being regional or cultural quirks that I’m simply not used to, and I grit my teeth through them, even if some days I have to grit more than others.

But one of the terms I loathe the most is soft skills. I’ve heard it my entire career – an at best mildly derisive term referring to pretty much anything that isn’t a straight-up math/technical skill. I don’t think the IT industry is the only industry that has this attitude to soft skills, but I do believe it’s emblematic of the problem.

All of these things and more have been lumped under “soft skills” my entire career. It’s foul. I was embarrassed, and annoyed with myself, that I’d allowed the term to actually slip into my nomenclature, however unintentional. None of these are soft – they all take practice and effort. You don’t decide one day to become the next John Brack and an hour later start churning out masterpieces like The Bar.

LinkedIn is a great example of how imitation does not guarantee greatness. Every self-titled influencer, every so-called game-changer on the platform who tries to imitate the delivery on a TED talk in their post is at best bland and boring, and more likely contemptibly false. If you’re not sure what I mean by this, just think of the structure 1-2 / pause:

I did something. Something innocuous.

This caused someone to react.

Their reaction was to get emotional at me. And you know what?

They were wrong.

1-2 sentences. Maybe, just maybe, sometimes 3. Followed by a pause (simulated on LinkedIn via a line gap.) Repeating ad-nauseam until you get to the line asking you to either follow them, or subscribe to their newsletter.

I’m not mocking TED talks (well, not much), but a never-ending collection of beige thinkers who put no effort into their seemingly endless succession of “inspirational” or “enlightening” muck on LinkedIn following exactly the same structure as a TED talk is a perfect example of how too many folk devalue just how useful it is to be able to communicate effectively, and with a modicum of originality – the one thing that guarantees that you’ll have readers come back.

There is a significant reason why fascist and repressive regimes crack down on “the liberal arts” when they come into power. Artists and thinkers, not to mention people who are trained to think and trained to communicate are either with the regime, or (more likely) an enemy. This is an example of why these skills are anything but soft. These skills are powerful tools that enable inspiration, messaging, thoughtful exchange of ideas and nuanced analysis.

New technical skills can be learned. Developers are expected to periodically pick up new programming languages, either as they move between companies or companies and teams find reasons to switch. Cloud specialists these days are expected to ensure their cloud skills are transferrable between the different hyper-scalers. Security folk are expected to constantly adapt and learn new things in an ever-shifting landscape.

The term “soft skills” is used though because there’s a perception that that's easy. It's what leads someone to wander through an art gallery and note “I could have done that”, or what prompts someone from a corporate, white-collar environment to suggest to an artist, writer or orator that perhaps they could do this thing for free, for the exposure.

In this age of “AI”, we’re learning that soft-skills are anything but. Countless gigawatts of power are burned through to enable an “AI” to build an image, to write an inspirational staff email, to summarise a meeting, to critically analyse a report. All of these things that are being done are from the realm previously (and still) classified as soft. It seems to me there’s an awful lot of time and effort being devoted to somehow replicate these skills – so perhaps it’s finally time to drop the term soft skills. Clearly, they’re not soft at all when so many folk need oh so very much help with them.

–fin–

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