Hacker News Reader

You've clearly got an axe to grind. The idea that sociopaths didn't exist in tech before is pretty easy to disprove, unless you think Steve Jobs was a benevolent person. Not to mention Ellison, Kalanick, Khosla, and honestly the list is endless (venture capitalists are famous for being assholes, many would say it's an asset to doing their job).

Money attracts assholes, I don't think many people would argue with that (although I'd honestly be interested in hearing arguments against this). So if your goal is to keep them away, then just make sure to never monetize your product.

I think parent poster is drawing a distinction between sociopathy toward capitalistic ends (i.e. making money, providing something of value to someone) and sociopathy toward ideological ends (e.g. social justice, trying to reform the world to be as one believes it should).

We always knew about the former, and it's in every industry. The latter is the more recent (and relevant) phenomenon.

Weirdly enough, I feel like saying the blame should not be put on the people for being assholes; assholery is not something people are born with. Rather, the type of environment is at fault for self-selecting for them.

I think the way to look at it is soft skills can compliment the hard skills, but any engineer w/out the hard skills has nothing to compliment:

engineer w/ hard skills = solid;

engineer w/ hard + soft skills = powerful;

engineer w/only soft skills = useless;

I disagree.

An engineer with soft skills, but no hard skills, isn't an engineer – but their soft skills may be usable elsewhere. (I find that engineering managers need to have a decent amount of engineering skill to be at all effective)

An engineer with hard skills, but no soft skills, is somewhere between unproductive and an active menace. The bare minimum soft skill is the ability to work effectively with others in a team. Someone who lacks this skill contributes more negative value, by harming the operation of the rest of the team, than any one person is able to create, no matter how good they are. And a system built by one person in angry isolation (which is where people quickly end up if they lack those skills) is a disaster from other perspectives: for example, production maintenance and operations, where ultimately only one person understands what they've built.

An engineer with enough hard skills to function in a team, but only that, is a net positive, but I'd hesitate to describe them as "solid" – rather, I'd say that gets them to be an effective journeyman, but means they'll never be able to lead anything, even something small.

Conversely, the "engineer" with lots of soft skills but minimal hard skills can be a manager – but not of anything too complex. Again, their career is permanently limited.

So there's a real law of the minimum at play here. But notably, the place you drop to at zero soft skills is way worse than the place you drop to at zero hard skills. The latter, you can find a use for; the former, you need to get out of your organization as quickly as possible, because they do active damage every day.

engineer w/only soft skills = management. Managers have their value too, but you can't only have managers.

I'd infinitely prefer a manager with at least some hard skills than one with none. My most frustrating managers were the ones you describe, because they just weren't at all qualified to make decisions about what we were doing. I don't think I'm alone among engineers in that opinion.

Preferring a manager with hard skills is like preferring an engineer with soft skills. It makes everything so much smoother. Similarly, I'd argue that a manager with only soft skills is as frustrating to work with as an engineer with only hard skills. They're functional, but it's not anywhere near ideal.

Completely agree, and I'd posit that if you have you never faced a manager with ONLY hard skills and no soft skills, you're lucky. They're miserable to work for. I worked for one who was promoted because he was really, really good at ServiceNow (the service du jour of our company), and he literally thought management was threatening people until he got his way....

...until he was forced out when none of the departments succeeded, that is.

Don't most people use tech to argue with each other on the Internet?

We also use it to construct theories about sociopaths infiltrating the industry and realigning the biggest players’ cultures to better suit their sociopath interests when someone suggests people skills might not be irrelevant.

Soft skills are often used as beating sticks on techies by the rest of populace; it's the usual "socially-clueless nerd" song we hear all the time, like we couldn't take care of ourselves. Don't tell me you didn't notice people that lack skills needed for their jobs diverting their attention to their strong aspects, like being "political", and trying to hack other people to believe that their skills are what actually matters instead of hard skills coming from years of practice and suffering. It's like the oldest play in the book, divert attention from your own shortcoming and negate what is important. Due to "nerds being clueless", it actually often works, which is sad.

"diverting their attention to their strong aspects"

"instead of hard skills coming from years of practice and suffering"

Kinda like you did there? ;-)

Anyway, this is an essential soft skill to have, and one that I suspect more techies exercise than they give themselves credit for. But the response to it is pretty simple: "Alright, if this organization doesn't value the skillset I have, I'll go work for an organization that does, doing a favor for both you, me, and that new organization." After all, why waste resources on something you don't need? The whole point of a market economy is to self-organize so that everyone gets the maximum amount of value out of their skills & talents.

I've pulled this card a couple times (not even as a negotiation tool, but because I honestly wanted to know if I should be spending my time on something else) and gotten back a "No, no, this is actually really important to us, please don't leave or stop doing it."

What nonsense, if anything it's techies who are themselves promoting this theory after years of working in the tech industry

Soft skills are important especially in programming. Open source projects for example, live and die by how much and how well they can engage their community, an inherently soft skill.

So there's truth to this -- I've certainly seen over and over again how non-technical people often try to put people with technical skills in a box (as if we can't have other skills), and it also can be frustrating to watch people stake out some territory as where they add value when you know the activity they're engaged in isn't particularly difficult and they're not bringing outlier skills to it.

But one of the things I figured out a while back is that even jobs that aren't particularly hard sometimes still need dedicated time and attention. Division of labor can help with that. And if you try doing one of the "easy"/soft jobs for a while, you might find that it requires a certain set of subtle skills that don't all come naturally to you.

For example, I tried being an account/project manager and sometimes-front-end-dev for a startup years ago. And I found out really quick that the former is (partly) about paying attention to lots of little pieces of information and trying to push them between people quickly and managing human expectations and keeping everybody oriented around the important next step and a bunch of other things which didn't require years of study but still needed work. Development, by contrast, required a stacked set of skills in dealing with a cooperating set of abstractions and lots of time in singularly focused attention. Doing both at the same time is not something I'd recommend to most people, btw -- dev work is focus-driven, management work is interrupt driven and there's an inherent conflict. So... division of labor makes a lot of sense and you might need someone to do the things involved here to keep the enterprise going as much as you need developers. This stuff "actually matters" even when it isn't rocket science.

It also does happen that there are people who are outlier-good at "soft" tasks. Not as often as people claim, but it does happen.

> trying to hack other people to believe that their skills are what actually matters instead of hard skills ... it actually often works, which is sad.

If they're successful, isn't that more or less proof of the utility of those skills? Being able to persuade people to adopt a given point of view -- or least to be able to negotiate to an agreement -- strikes me as one of the most useful skills there could be. It's essentially hot-swapping code in someone else's brain! :)

I think what most of us technical folks get frustrated at is watching perceived value (and with it, authority and compensation) accumulate outside of our reach. But if this is a perception problem, perhaps the soft skill of persuasion is the answer.

Don't tell me you didn't notice people that lack skills needed for their jobs diverting their attention to their strong aspects

...you mean like pretending that only the easy stuff (interacting with the machine) matters, and all the complicated hard-to-understand things about interacting usefully with other humans are completely irrelevant? :)

instead of hard skills coming from years of practice and suffering

Um, no, the "hard" skills come from playing with the machine and solving puzzles for fun. They're not "hard" as in "not easy", it's as in "not fuzzy".

Due to "nerds being clueless", it actually often works, which is sad.

I do not appreciate your insults to my status as a competent adult.

Are you sure you're as much on the side of the "nerds" as you pretend to be?

Tech is full of messy, untrustworthy and corrupt people. There was never lack of sociopaths or bad actors in tech, no less then anywhere else. We are however, fond of telling ourselves that we are better then everyone else.

Sure, but our industry was never as corrupt as e.g. finances, doing back-channel financing of atrocities like wars/genocides, buying politicians to bypass popular sentiment, setting up drug distribution centers and prostitution rings nearby so that their employees can kill their inner humanity and have reward for corrupting themselves. My fear is that we are becoming the same and that change is happening right now.

IBM designed and maintained those machines that facilitated holocaust. Meaning, a lot of techies were on a place installing, training users and seeing wagons and facilities. Not just management. NSA spying runs on techies and backdoors don't make themselves. Blackhat is a thing too. Tech does not have as much power as finances through.

But most importantly, on the single average engineer level, which is more relevant, there are plenty of companies with backstabbing culture or individual bad actors in companies with otherwise good culture. For example, I have seen engineers badmouth other peoples work not because it would be bad, but to make themselves look good in comparison. Etc.

I guess most of those techies were on "need to know" basis, likely clueless about what was going really on and only the key players (bosses) were corrupt and aware. It's hard for many techies, by nature idealists, to fully grasp how the world truly works, until they are disposed of when their usefulness ends, or they have first-hand experience from war/hit or even from approaching share vesting date and their company going fully into Game-of-Thrones mode etc.

Nope, there is quite detailed book on that. They were on place, in Germany and occupied territories. Installing machines, designing punch cards with cooperation of users and training users. Some machines were directly in concentration camps and some on railways used to transport Jews. If you got there to maintain, you seen them. Some were used to sort people by race on occupied territories - and even if you not knew about holocaust you knew it is about finding and mistreating Jews. That much was clear to contemporaries.

Bosses were aware and managed operation. That is true.

> It's hard for many techies, by nature idealists, to fully grasp how the world truly works

Not all techies are idealists and it is not necessary to be idealist to have good hard skills. Also, idealists tend to be focused a bit less on those hard skills then pragmatics (being attracted to ideals). While some techies (on the spectrum) have hard time to grasp world, many many don't. Those who do were less likely to get goodies.

Do you have any references for that? I'm quite incredulous that American IBM employees were on place, in Germany and occupied territories, during a time that America was engaged in war with Germany.

"IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation" by Edwin Black.

IBM had child company in Germany Dehomag, but transported machines and cards from outside too (including during war through not whole of it). The book however deals more with management and non-German citizens guilt which is harder to show. That people of all sorts in the Germany, including technologistics, were contributing to Nazi plans is easier to believe. It was just first example that came to my mind.

Oh the poor little innocent ingenues! /s

Techies aren't idiots (any more so than anyone else).

And what do you propose?

It doesn't take much to poke holes in the way things are - it's a lot harder to do something about it, other than 'raising awareness' aka complaining.

There are some things ongoing by people that realize what is happening, for example in the blockchain space. Blockchain beside attempting to solve cool tech problem of Byzantine generals was also motivated by increasing transparency, i.e. removing or disclosing corruption by money means. There is more work done right now to prevent dominant intermediaries like Amazon from increasingly abusing their position by removing the need to use their platform at all and move it to a p2p blockchain instead. There are now options to (or at least try to) put an end to millenia of horrible human behavior.

There is more work done right now to prevent dominant intermediaries like Amazon from increasingly abusing their position by removing the need to use their platform at all and move it to a p2p blockchain instead.

So, those small online stores didn't used to all be on Amazon or Ebay. Which means those platforms must be providing something that the store proprietors think is worth losing some of their independence over.

What is that "something", and what does the blockchain do to provide it that just getting an account with a payment processor doesn't do?

For example not being kicked out from a platform for no reason, because some MBA needs to fill their quarterly quota of kicked out 3rd party sellers? Not giving sales data on what is selling well to your competitor that in turn would start manufacturing their "essentials" line, copying your product, and undercutting you? Please read what is right now happening with Amazon and tell me you like what it is becoming. Amazon used to be very useful for sellers when it allowed rotating shopping cart so that everyone got some throughput on a single marketplace, paying them some 15% of revenue for this "marketing". This is no longer feasible for most 3rd party sellers; instead Amazon is becoming very restrictive, siding with big brands, more and more rejecting honest businesses and locking them out of their platform.

> This is no longer feasible for most 3rd party sellers; instead Amazon is becoming very restrictive, siding with big brands, more and more rejecting honest businesses and locking them out of their platform.

I'd be interested in reading more detailed first-hand descriptions of this, but searching for some key phrases from your description is just bringing up irrelevant product links. It's seemingly at odds with the rampant counterfeiting and listing spam (to confirm that my experience isn't outdated, I just went to the "Unlocked Cell Phones" category, sorted by lowest price, and found a listing for "Example Product Title" by "Example Product Brand", available from 3 sellers) on Amazon. I guess it's conceivable that Amazon is good at logistics/infrastructure but flagrantly awful at the "marketplace" component.

They recently opened up their marketplace to junk sellers from China and India, then adjusted their automated ML to be super restrictive to sort out the junk, and honest US businesses are now treated the same way as junk Indian ones, getting kicked out on mere suspicions of violations (i.e. presumed to be guilty by default). I guess it doesn't matter to them.