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Comment by f1gm3nt | Hacker News Reader

Soft skills are the way I found that stands out. Being an engineer there is still the belief that engineers are ass holes and treat others poorly. Being able to explain complex topics and doing so in a way that doesn't come off like a jerk has been the most helpful. Always be positive and provide stakeholders with options with your recommendation and the reasons why.

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This includes: the ability to make eye contact, to listen to other people, to ask question, to confirm what you said was understood, to confirm what you were told is understood.

You don't have to be a psychologist, just interested in other people, what your shared goals are, and confirming that you are working together to achieve them.

Totally agree! My current team always asks increasing complex questions in an interview until we the candidate admits 'I dont know that'. People with good soft skills can easily say 'I dont know, what does happen in that case?'. They come off as polite and self-aware. My other favourite interview question is what do you do when QA says they can reproduce a bug but you cant? A lot of developers don't have the soft skills to explain how they work with QA instead of against QA.

I mean you definitely need the culture for that, not every place is like that. Too often I have worked with people accusing me of not knowing about the Domain in question enough. (Even if it's something that can be learned in a short amount of time, if would be properly explained...) And what happens is then that I must work on something else.

Especially in really culturally old school IT places you need to earn your (invisible) badges.

So you are definitely right but at many places you shoot yourself in the foot with that big time...

I have gotten the impression that the more engineers are around, the less welcome are explanations of any kind unless there is someone with a really high reputation. Of course people like to listen to the management types of people but it's afterwards still ignored.

Probably this is not the case at every organisation but I see there is a strong force that makes people do things exactly the way they want and nothing else. To be honest, I think this behaviour is not at all limited to engineers...

But yeah, Soft skills, especially not caring only for oneself, are very helpful but they should be spread among the team.

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